Using cuke4duke and working around rubygems issues

 Java, Ruby  No Responses »
Sep 132011
 

cuke4duke support has been dropped in favor of work on cucumber-jvm. Which is all well and good, except that cucumber-jvm isn’t fully baked yet. It’s not quite there regarding features, but it’s getting there fast.

Unfortunately, that means for those that are still using cuke4duke, you’ve got problems to deal with. The voodoo magic that is cuke4duke does not install gems very well. I don’t know precisely why this is, but it ends up with many problems. Things that will install just fine using a jruby command line, or in native ruby barf a horrible death. Often regarding some YAML::Syck thing.

ERROR:  While executing gem ... (ArgumentError)
      undefined class/module YAML::Syck::DefaultKey

Really sucks and makes it difficult to actually use cuke4duke unless you’ve already got all the gems you need installed.

After much investigation, I discovered that cuke4duke uses a GEM_HOME of ~/.m2/repository/.jruby . So a simple command can get the gems you want installed into that folder:

java -jar jruby-complete-1.6.4.jar -S gem install json --version=1.5.4 --no-rdoc --no-ri -i /home/dkowis/.m2/repository/.jruby

Unfortunately, if there’s another “gem” command in your path, it will use that instead of the one in your jar file, so you have to munge your path as well to prevent it from doing so.

Finally, I needed a way to get this into our project’s Maven POM so that we could easily set up other peoples boxes and the configuration isn’t lost in some terribly manual process of running that command over and over.

This is the solution I came up with:

        <profile>
            <id>install-gems</id>
            <build>
                <plugins>
                    <plugin>
                        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                        <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
                        <version>1.6</version>
                        <executions>
                            <execution>
                                <phase>generate-test-resources</phase>
                                <configuration>
                                    <target>
                                        <property file="gems.properties"/>
                                        <macrodef name="install-gem">
                                            <attribute name="gem"/>
                                            <attribute name="version"/>
                                            <sequential>
                                                <java jar="${maven.dependency.org.jruby.jruby-complete.jar.path}"
                                                      fork="true"
                                                      failonerror="true"
                                                      maxmemory="64m"
                                                      newenvironment="true">
                                                    <arg value="-S"/>
                                                    <arg value="gem"/>
                                                    <arg value="install"/>
                                                    <arg value="@{gem}"/>
                                                    <arg value="--version=@{version}"/>
                                                    <arg value="-i"/>
                                                    <arg value="${user.home}/.m2/repository/.jruby"/>
                                                    <env key="PATH" path="${java.home}/bin"/>
                                                </java>
                                            </sequential>
                                        </macrodef>
                                        <install-gem gem="json" version="1.5.4"/> <!-- needed to get json to behave with jruby -->
                                        <install-gem gem="cucumber" version="1.0.3"/>
                                        <install-gem gem="cuke4duke" version="${gem.cuke4duke.version}"/>
                                        <install-gem gem="nokogiri" version="${gem.nokogiri.version}"/>
                                        <install-gem gem="rspec" version="${gem.rspec.version}"/>
                                        <install-gem gem="rest-client" version="${gem.restclient.version}"/>
                                        <install-gem gem="jruby-openssl" version="${gem.jrubyopenssl.version}"/>
                                    </target>
                                </configuration>
                                <goals>
                                    <goal>run</goal>
                                </goals>
                            </execution>
                        </executions>
                    </plugin>
                </plugins>
            </build>
        </profile>

One can then run the command ‘mvn test -Pinstall-gems’ and the gems will be installed as part of the test-resource-generation phase. This only has to be done once whenever new gems are added, or on initial setup. Once it’s done, you’re good to go with the normal cuke4duke workflow.

Hopefully this will save other people some time :)

 Posted by David Kowis at 15:05  Tagged with: , ,

Adding additional recipes to your Capistrano deploy.rb

 Ruby  No Responses »
Aug 212011
 

This was unbelievably difficult to find on the internet. Perhaps I didn’t know the right things to look for.

I wanted to figure out how to require/load/import additional files into the deploy.rb file so that I would be able to drop recipes in to a config/recipes directory.

Turns out this is the solution.

I ended up using this to simply load all the recipes in the recipes directory:

#load in all the other recipes
$LOAD_PATH.unshift File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), 'recipes')
Dir['config/recipes/**/*.rb'].each { |recipe| require  File.basename(recipe, '.rb') }
 Posted by David Kowis at 18:23  Tagged with: ,

Testing API calls using Cucumber and Rails 3

 Ruby  No Responses »
Apr 302011
 

As it turns out, in Rails 3.x, webrat and cucumber don’t play along so well. You start getting horribly annoying, and difficult to solve error messages. The solution in that link is to change the testing method from Rails to Rack. That works, for things like visiting pages, but it broke all of my API tests, where I verify the response code of the body and the JSON that I get back.

I looked into upgrading cucumber-rails, and apparently they recommend using Capybara instead of webrat for Rails 3. So I make the necessary changes. Unfortunately Capybara only has a get method. You can only visit pages. Any posts should be exercised by the web forms. This is far less than useful. It has proven to be a huge pain the butt. Hours of trying to find how people do this to no avail. Until I find an obscure answer, at the bottom of a StackOverflow posting.

That code on github is the key to testing APIs. It appears to use some of the more internal guts of the Capybara page drivers to accomplish it’s goal. Works for me.

I am surprised to see that there are few integration test frameworks that support this kind of web service test. Especially since where I work, this is what we build. Having Cucumber features describing those API calls makes everyone’s job easier. I find it unfortunate that it seems to be somewhat ignored by the testing community. Hopefully this will contain the necessary words for other people that are searching for the same thing I spent hours searching for, and will find it in far less time.

 Posted by David Kowis at 20:23  Tagged with: , , , , ,

I made a Ruby gem

 Ruby  No Responses »
Apr 012011
 

I forked an xmpp4-simple gem that had some issues, and figured out which they were, and then committed the fixes in my own github repo.

It appears that the original gem is unmaintained, and so I just forked it and updated some parts.

 Posted by David Kowis at 13:47  Tagged with: ,

Building ruby 1.9 on Fedora 13

 fedora, Ruby  No Responses »
Jun 192010
 

Was harder than it should’ve been. I got annoyed.

You need to install openssl-devel, zlib-devel, bison, gcc, make, patch, tar, and maybe gcc-c++ (although I don’t think this one is needed).

Go get the latest ruby 1.9 source, as of this writing 1.9-p378, and extract it somewhere. Then go get the patches on this bug, at the specific comment. You will need to apply at least the openssl-build-fix patch, since fedora uses openssl 1.0 and it’s not yet into ruby 1.9. Then follow your typical ./cofnigure, make, and make install stuff. I installed mine into a prefix of /opt/ruby so that it wouldn’t affect any fedora ruby stuff that it might want. I then added ruby’s path to the end of my user’s PATH variable.

That’ll get you a working ruby 1.9 in Fedora.

 Posted by David Kowis at 12:19  Tagged with: ,
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