SpecViews

Save views from request and controller specs for comparision.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'spec_views'

And this to RSpec's rails_helper.rb:

require 'spec_views/support'

Then execute:

$ bundle

Ignore some generated files in your .gitignore:

/spec/fixtures/views/*/challenger.*
/spec/fixtures/views/*/last_run.txt

Usage

Use the match_html_fixture matcher in your spec:

RSpec.describe "Articles", type: :request do
  describe 'GET /articles' do
    it 'renders the listing' do
      get articles_path
      expect(response).to match_html_fixture
    end
  end
end

Run this spec to see it failing. Open SpecView UI http://localhost:3000/spec_views on Rails development server to accept the new view. When rerunning the spec it compares its rendering with the reference view. Use SpecView UI to review, accept or reject changed views.

view_sanitizer

Sometimes it is hard to remove dynamic elements like IDs and times. Use view_sanitizer.gsub to replace dynamic strings with fixed ones before comparing and saving the views automatically:

before do
  view_sanitizer.gsub(%r{(users/)[0-9]+}, '\1ID')
  view_sanitizer.gsub(/value="[0-9]+"/, 'value="ID"')
end

view_sanitizer.gsub supports the same arguments as String#gsub including blocks.

it_renders

You can also use the shortcut to skip the matcher and the word "renders" from your description:

RSpec.describe "Articles", type: :request do
  describe 'GET /articles' do
    it_renders 'the listing' do
      get articles_path
    end
  end
end

Different response status

By default only status 200 responses are compared. Tell the matcher if your response has another one:

RSpec.describe "Articles", type: :request do
  describe 'GET /articles' do
    it 'renders the listing' do
      get articles_path
      expect(response).to match_html_fixture.for_status(:not_found) # or 404
    end
  end
end

Add an affix

If you have two requests with the same description, you can add an affix to the generated name:

RSpec.describe "Articles", type: :request do
  describe 'GET /articles' do
    it 'renders the listing' do
      get articles_path
      expect(response).to match_html_fixture.with_affix('only 10')

      get articles_path(all: '1')
      expect(response).to match_html_fixture.with_affix('all')
    end
  end
end

PDF matching

If your request responds with a PDF you can compare it as well:

RSpec.describe "Articles", type: :request do
  describe 'GET /articles/1/download' do
    it 'downloads as PDF' do
      get article_path(1, format: :pdf)
      expect(response).to match_pdf_fixture
    end
  end
end

Mailer specs

Compare HTML mailers. match_html_fixture tries to find the HTML part of your mail automatically:

RSpec.describe NotificationsMailer, type: :mailer do
  describe '#notify' do
    let(:mail) { NotificationsMailer.signup }

    it 'renders the body' do
      expect(mail).to match_html_fixture
    end
  end
end

Feature specs

Compare pages from feature specs:

RSpec.describe 'Articles', type: :feature do
  it 'are shown as list' do
    expect(page).to match_html_fixture
  end
end

Controller specs

Prefer request specs over controller specs. If you still want to use controller specs enable the render_views feature:

RSpec.describe HomeController, type: :controller do
  describe 'GET #show' do
    render_views

    it 'renders the homepage' do
      get :show
      expect(response).to match_html_fixture
    end
  end
end

The it_renders shortcuts enables render_views automatically.

Configuration

Configure SpecView by adding and modifying lines to config/environments/test.rb and config/environments/development.rb:

config.spec_views.directory = 'spec/fixtures/views'
config.spec_views.ui_url = 'http://localhost:3000/spec_views'

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.