Steak

Minimalist acceptance testing on top of RSpec

What is Steak?

Steak is like Cucumber but in plain Ruby. This is how an acceptance spec looks like in Steak:

feature "Main page" do

  background do
    create_user :login => "jdoe"
    login_as "jdoe"
  end

  scenario "should show existing quotes" do
    create_quote :text => "The language of friendship is not words, but meanings", 
                 :author => "Henry David Thoreau"

    visit "/"

    page.should have_css(".quote", :count => 1)
    within(:css, ".quote") do
      page.should have_css(".text", :text => "The language of friendship is not words, but meanings")
      page.should have_css(".author", :text => "Henry David Thoreau")
    end
  end

end

No explicit givens, whens or thens. No steps, no english, just Ruby: RSpec, Steak and, in this example, some factories and Capybara. That’s all.

If you are not in Rails but use RSpec, then Steak is just some aliases providing you with the language of acceptance testing (feature, scenario, background). If you are in Rails, you also have a couple of generators, a rake task and full Rails integration testing (meaning Webrat support, for instance)

Getting started

Not in Rails

Just install and require the damned gem!

$ gem install steak

Then in your spec or spec helper:

require 'steak'

That’s all. You don’t really need to require RSpec.

In Rails 2.x (stable branch)

Assuming you have already setup rspec-rails, add this to your project’s config/environments/test.rb:

config.gem "steak"

Install the gem from the command line:

$ RAILS_ENV=test rake gems:install

Run the generator:

$ script/generate steak

That will create some basic helper files and directory structure under the spec/acceptance directory, already configured for Capybara. If you want to use Webrat, just pass it to the generator:

$ script/generate steak --webrat

Spend one minute on getting familiar with the structure and files you’ve got.

Now you may want to create your first acceptance spec:

$ script/generate acceptance_spec this_is_my_first_feature

You run your acceptance specs just like your regular specs. Individually…

$ spec spec/acceptance/this_is_my_first_feature_spec.rb

…or all together:

$ spec spec/acceptance

…you can also do:

$ rake spec:acceptance

In Rails 3 (master branch)

Add this to your project’s Gemfile:

gem 'steak', '>= 0.4.0.a5'

And install it:

$ bundle install

Run the generator:

$ rails generate steak

That will create some basic helper files and directory structure under the spec/acceptance directory, already configured for Capybara. If you want to use Webrat, just pass it to the generator:

$ rails generate steak --webrat

Spend one minute on getting familiar with the structure and files you’ve got.

Now you may want to create your first acceptance spec:

$ rails generate acceptance_spec this_is_my_first_feature

You run your acceptance specs just like your regular specs. Individually…

$ spec spec/acceptance/this_is_my_first_feature_spec.rb

…or all together:

$ spec spec/acceptance

…you can also do:

$ rake spec:acceptance

Resources

• Source: github.com/cavalle/steak

• Issues: github.com/cavalle/steak/issues

• Group: groups.google.com/group/steakrb

• IRC channel: #steakrb on freenode

• Tutorial: jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2010/steak-because-cucumber-is-for-vegetarians/

• Hashtag: #steakrb

Credits

Steak was created by Luismi Cavallé and improved thanks to the love from:

• Álvaro Bautista

• Felipe Talavera

• Paco Guzmán

• Jeff Kreeftmeijer

• Jaime Iniesta

• Emili Parreño

• Andreas Wolff

Copyright © 2009, 2010 Luismi Cavallé, released under the MIT license