Rake tasks cheatsheet

It's frustrating that typing:

     rake -T

gives you some but not all of the tasks that are available. If you are only a part-time user of Rails, it's easy to forget the precise syntax for those undocumented commands.

That's why I really liked the TutorialsPoint page which lists many more of the built-in rake -T commands. Very helpful.

Now, if folks would just fully document their rake tasks, we could see everything right where we need it without resorting to an external site.

ERROR: Gem bundler is not installed, run `gem install bundler` first... FIXED

Have you ever had the problem when using RVM that bundler is listed as an installed gem, yet trying to run bundler gives you an error? This is obviously a regularly recurring problem as there are many posts about this issue... and most of them don't work.

jseidel@EDP15:~/Dev/WebForms$ gem list

 *** LOCAL GEMS ***

bundler (1.1.5)
json (1.7.5)
rake (0.9.2.2)
ruby-ole (1.2.11.4)
rubygems-bundler (1.0.6)
rvm (1.11.3.5)
spreadsheet (0.7.3)
jseidel@EDP15:~/Dev/WebForms$ bundle install
ERROR: Gem bundler is not installed, run `gem install bundler` first.
jseidel@EDP15:~/Dev/WebForms$ whence bundle
bundle is /home/jseidel/.rvm/bin/bundle

My .bashrc script has the proper RVM incantations at the end of the file, and I've got a gemset defined... everything looks perfect, except that it doesn't work.  I've gotten bitten by this more than once, so at least with this post I won't have to go searching all over the place again to find the solution.

If you tried everything else and it still doesn't fix the problem, run the command:

rvm reload

and you should be good to go. Hopefully this'll help someone avoid the fruitless searches I went through. It would be nice if there was some kind of helpful message from RVM or somewhere a clear explanation of why this happens occasionally for no apparent reason.

Cucumber, Capybara, and Webkit testing for Ajaxified actions

I recently upgraded my testing stack and now use Capybara and Webkit with Cucumber (and RSpec, too). I ran into a number of problems and found this post by Mathew O'Riordan incredibly helpful. He tracks the history of his research and testing through a github project and at various points on the blog entry shows the commit for the changes he just discussed: kudos on that approach!

A couple of gotchas that I ran into along the way:

First, you may need to add the following line to your features/support/env.rb file:

require 'capybara-webkit'

O'Riordan doesn't do this in his project, but I got an error:

"no driver called :webkit was found, available drivers: :rack_test, :selenium (Capybara::DriverNotFoundError)"

and found this discussion which gave me the solution.

Second, although it may be obvious, I missed the fact that you MUST put

@javascript

before each scenario that requires in-browser javascript. I had thought this was just a way of grouping scenarios together, but it actually triggers the use of the webkit driver to run the step.