jasmine-rails gem

NOTE: This project is no longer actively maintained!

This project is intended to make it a little easier to integrate Jasmine into your workflow, particularly if you're working in Rails 3.2 or later. (If you're on earlier versions of Rails, I'd suggest directly using the combination of Pivotal's jasmine gem and jasmine-headless-webkit.)

By bundling this gem and configuring your project, you can expect to:

• Be able to run Jasmine specs in a browser (powered by Rails engine mounted into your application)
• Be able to run Jasmine specs from the command line (powered by PhantomJS)
• Write specs or source in CoffeeScript, leveraging the asset pipeline to pre-process it

Installation

First, add jasmine-rails to your Gemfile, like so

group :test, :development do
  gem 'jasmine-rails'
end

Next:

$ bundle install

And finally, run the Rails generator:

$ rails generate jasmine_rails:install

The generator will create the necessary configuration files and mount a test runner to /specs so that you can get started writing specs!

Configuration

Configuring the Jasmine test runner is done in spec/javascripts/support/jasmine.yml.

Asset Pipeline Support

The jasmine-rails gem fully supports the Rails asset pipeline which means you can:

• use coffee_script or other Javascript precompilers for source or test files
• use sprockets directives to control inclusion/exclusion of dependent files
• leverage asset pipeline search paths to include assets from various sources/gems

If you choose to use the asset pipeline support, many of the jasmine.yml configurations become unnecessary and you can rely on the Rails asset pipeline to do the hard work of controlling what files are included in your test suite.

# minimalist jasmine.yml configuration when leveraging asset pipeline
spec_files:
  - "**/*[Ss]pec.{js,coffee}"

You can write a spec to test Foo in spec/javascripts/foo_spec.js:

// include spec/javascripts/helpers/some_helper_file.js and app/assets/javascripts/foo.js
//= require helpers/some_helper_file
//= require foo
describe('Foo', function() {
  it("does something", function() {
    expect(1 + 1).toBe(2);
  });
});

*As noted above, spec_helper and foo.js must be required in order for foo_spec.js to run.

Spec files in engine

If you have an engine mounted in your project and you need to test the engine's javascript files, you can instruct jasmine to include and run the spec files from that engine directory.

Given your main project is located in /workspace/my_project and your engine in /workspace/engine, you can add the following in the the jasmine.yml file:

spec_dir:
  - spec/javascripts
  - ../engine/spec/javascripts

Include javascript from external source

If you need to test javascript files that are not part of the assets pipeline (i.e if you have a mobile application that resides outside of your rails app) you can add the following in the the jasmine.yml file:

include_dir:
  - ../mobile_app/public/js

Running from the command line

If you were to run:

bundle exec rake spec:javascript

You'd hopefully see something like:

Running Jasmine specs...

PASS: 0 tests, 0 failures, 0.001 secs.

You can filter execution by passing the SPEC option as well:

bundle exec rake spec:javascript SPEC=my_test

If you experience an error at this point, the most likely cause is JavaScript being loaded out of order, or otherwise conflicting with other existing JavaScript in your project. See "Debugging" below.

Running from your browser

Startup your Rails server (ex: bundle exec rails s), and navigate to the path you have configured in your routes.rb file (ex: http://localhost:3000/specs). The Jasmine spec runner should appear and start running your test suite instantly.

Debugging

In your browser

In my workflow, I like to work with specs in the command line until I hit a snag and could benefit from debugging in Web Inspector or Firebug to figure out what's going on.

From the command line

Even though they both read from the same config file, it's certainly possible that your specs will pass in the browser and fail from the command line. In this case, you can try to debug or analyze what's going on loading the headless runner.html file into your browser environment. The generated runner.html file is written out to tmp/jasmine/runner.html after each run.

Ajax / XHRs

As a general rule, Jasmine is designed for unit testing, and as a result real network requests are not appropriate for tests written in Jasmine. (Isolation strategies can include spying on asynchronous libraries and then synchronously testing callback behavior, as demonstrated in this gist).

If your application code issues XHR requests during your test run, please note that XHR requests for the local filesystem are blocked by default for most browsers for security reasons. To debug local XHR requests (for example, if you jasmine-jquery fixtures), you will need to enable local filesystem requests in your browser.

Example for Google Chrome (in Mac OS X): open -a "Google Chrome" tmp/jasmine/runner.html --args --allow-file-access-from-files

Again, it's the opinion of the present author that this shouldn't be necessary in any situation but legacy rescue of an existing test suite. With respect specifically to HTML fixtures, please consider jasmine-fixture and my rationale for it.

Custom Helpers

If you need to write a custom spec runner template (for example, using requireJS to load components from your specs), you might benefit from custom helper functions. The controller will attempt to load JasmineRails::SpecHelper if it exists. An example:

# in lib/jasmine_rails/spec_helper.rb
module JasmineRails
  module SpecHelper
    def custom_function
      "hello world"
    end
  end
end

Create a custom layout in app/views/layouts/jasmine_rails/spec_runner.html.erb and reference your helper:

<%= custom_function %>

If you wanted to do something like this using requirejs-rails, your helper might look like this:

# in lib/jasmine_rails/spec_helper.rb
module JasmineRails
  module SpecHelper
    # Gives us access to the require_js_include_tag helper
    include RequirejsHelper
  end
end

Remove any reference to src_files in spec/javascripts/support/jasmine.yml, to ensure files aren't loaded prematurely.

Create your custom layout app/views/layouts/jasmine_rails/spec_runner.html.erb like so:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"/>
    <title>Jasmine Specs</title>

    <%= stylesheet_link_tag *jasmine_css_files %>
    <%= requirejs_include_tag %>
    <%= javascript_include_tag *jasmine_js_files %>
  </head>
  <body>
    <div id="jasmine_content"></div>
    <%= yield %>
  </body>
</html>

Use require with a callback to load your components:

describe 'test my module', ->
  require ['my/module'], (Module) ->
    it 'does something', ->
      expect(Module.method).toEqual 'something'

Custom Reporter

You can configure custom reporter files to use when running from the command line in jasmine.yml:

reporters:
  cool-reporter:
    - "cool-reporter.js"
  awesome-reporter:
    - "awesome-part-1.js"
    - "awesome-part-2.js"

Then, specify which reporters to use when you run the rake task:

REPORTERS='cool-reporter,awesome-reporter' rake spec:javascripts

The console reporter shipped with jasmine-rails will be used by default, and you can explicitly use it by the name console.

See jasmine-junitreporter for an example with JUnit output.

PhantomJS binary

By default the PhantomJS gem will be responsible for finding and using an appropriate version of PhantomJS. If however, you wish to manage your own phantom executable you can set:

use_phantom_gem: false

This will then try and use the phantom executable on the current PATH.

PhantomJS command-line options

If you want to pass command-line options to phantomjs executable, you can set:

phantom_options: --web-security=no --debug=yes

This will pass everything defined on phantom_options as options.