Capybara VS Ruby on Rails

Cuba takes help from a lot of other technologies to bring the best of everything. For example, the responses in Cuba are the optimized version of the Rack responses. The templates are integrated via Tilt and testing via Cutest and Capybara.

I am going to use a browser based testing tool called Playwright (But you could use Capybara, or Selenium WebDriver etc.).

Even as a much smaller team, building Heii On-Call [0] as a lightweight alerting/monitoring/on-call rotations SaaS based on Ruby on Rails has basically been a pleasure!

And as the article highlights, perhaps the key reason for smooth deployments and upgrades is that the CI testing story is so, so good: RSpec [1] plus Capybara [2] for us. That means we have decently extensive tests of just about all behavior. The few small Rails and Ruby upgrades we've done have gone quite smoothly and confidently, with usually just a few non-Rails gem dependencies needing to be manually updated as well.

The "microservices" story is where we've pulled in the Crystal programming language [3] to great effect. After dabbling with Go and Rust, we've found that Crystal is truly a breath of fresh air. Crystal powers the parts of Heii On-Call that need to be fast and low-RAM, specifically the inbound API https://api.heiioncall.com/ and the outbound HTTP(S) prober background processes. I've ported some shared utility classes from Ruby to Crystal almost completely by just copy-and-pasting ___.rb to ___.cr; porting the tests for those classes was far more onerous than porting the class code itself. (Perhaps another point of evidence toward the superiority of RoR's testing story...)

The front-end story is nice but just a bit weaker. Using Hotwire / Turbo successfully, but I have an open PR to fix a fairly obvious stale cache bug in Turbo [4] that has been sitting unloved for nearly a month, despite other users reporting the same issue. I'm hopeful that it will get merged in the next release, but definitely less active than the backend side.

For me, the key conclusion is that the excellent Ruby on Rails testing story is what enables everything to go a lot more smoothly and have such a strong foundation. I'd be curious if any GitHubbers can talk more about whether they too are using Rspec+Capybara or something else? Are there internal guidelines for test coverage?

[0] https://heiioncall.com/

[1] https://rspec.info/

[2] https://github.com/teamcapybara/capybara

[3] https://crystal-lang.org/

[4] https://github.com/hotwired/turbo/pull/895

Engineering at Aha! focuses on using and improving the Capybara test framework. We have added many helpers and additional functionality to make working with Capybara easy. Testing at mobile widths is another chance to improve our testing tooling. Here is the incremental approach that we used to add mobile testing helpers.

Since the Capybara library drives the underlying tests, Minitest also has the same syntax.

We can write component tests with any language or framework, but the most popular ones are probably Cucumber and Capybara.

The nice thing about partial templates is that templates are unit-testable with View specs (or similarly in Minitest) and the rendered output can even be verified using Capybara matchers.

To piggyback: This would be a type of browser test, so you would want to use something like Cypress (https://github.com/testdouble/cypress-rails) or Capybara (https://github.com/teamcapybara/capybara). RSpec has a good integration with Capybara. Cypress is JS-based so it will require some additional config.

When you write a system test (or, as we prefer, a system spec) with Ruby on Rails, you're exercising the whole stack from the point of view of the user. So, naturally, you have to do things like make sure that certain elements are on the page and work as you expect when you click on then, type in them, and drag them around. Capybara works exceedingly well for this, giving you a lovely API for querying HTML.

[0] is a my favorite demonstration of it.

[0]: https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/b83965785db1eec019edf1...

Here's a real life example: Imagine a Ruby on Rails app on which a team of developers are working. The code is hosted on GitLab and all the work is coordinated using GitLab issues. In other words: For every commit, there's an associated issue and the issue number acts as a sort of primary key for documentation, time reporting and so forth. This convention has a few advantages, most notably the ability to easily learn more about how, when and by whom features were implemented as well as how this implementation came to be.

Ruby on Rails is regarded as one of the best ruby frameworks. It was the primary language in developing big projects such as Twitter and helped the language boost the community. Often referred to as “Rails,” Ruby on Rails is a web development framework with an MVC control structure and currently running its 6.1 version. The 16-year-old language has dramatically influenced the web development structures and managing databases, web pages, and other components on a web application.

In Rails 7.1, a new option _instance_methods is introduced, allowing developers to opt-out of the automatic generation of instance methods for enums. When enum is defined with _instance_methods: false, Rails will no longer generate methods like pending?, processed?, etc.

Rails isn't super opinionated about database writes, its mostly left up to developers to discover that for relational DBs you do not want to be doing a bunch of small writes all at once.

That said it specifically has tools to address this that started appearing a few years ago https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/35077

The way my team handles it is to stick Kafka in between whats generating the records (for us, a bunch of web scraping workers) and and a consumer that pulls off the Kafka queue and runs an insert when its internal buffer reaches around 50k rows.

Rails is also looking to add some more direct background type work with https://github.com/basecamp/solid_queue but this is still very new - most larger Rails shops are going to be running a second system and a gem called Sidekiq that pulls jobs out of Redis.

I'm looking forward to see what extractions from this will land on rails. For example: https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/50454

Here is what strict_loading does (source):

Kamal is a wonderfully simple way to deploy your applications anywhere. It will also be included by default in Rails 8. Kamal is trivial, but I don’t recommend using it on your development machine.

Here's the GitHub milestone I've based this article on — https://github.com/rails/rails/milestone/87