Accessing application session in Capybara

Trouble

There are some cases when you may need to access application session in your tests:

User signup or registration flow is too long.
Application use another backend and store result into session.

In each story you must repeat the same steps. You can actually use some shared code but it does not speed-up tests anyway.

Nowadays if you want to access session in cucumber/capybara acceptance test you are in trouble.

Capybara’ README says:

  Access to session and request is not possible from the test ...

And it’s true :)

Rescue

So is it actually possible to access session? Actually yes :)

Instead of trying to hack capybara you may just extend your application in test environment!
Just add some code that modify session according to given request parameters.

If you use rack based application then your are lucky –
try rack_session_access gem.

If it’s another application you need implement concept yourself :)

This gem should work with any rack application. We covered it with acceptance testing against:

rack builder application
sinatra application
rails3 application

Usage

  $ gem install rack_session_access

See README for usage examples.

Rails + Rspec + Capybara example

Add to spec/spec_helper.rb:

require 'capybara/rspec'
require 'rack_session_access/capybara'

Rails.application.config do
  config.middleware.use RackSessionAccess::Middleware
end

And use set_rack_session helper in acceptance test:

require 'spec_helper'

feature "My feature" do
  background do
    @user = Factory(:user)
  end
  scenario "logged in user goes to profile page" do
    # read your authorization engine manual how it store user into session
    page.set_rack_session(:user_id => @user.id)
    page.visit '/profile'
    ...
  end
end

Conclusion

Enjoy faster testing!