jasmine-rails gem

This project is intended to make it a little easier to integrate Jasmine into your workflow, particularly if you're working in Rails 3.1 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

Prerequisites

Install phantomjs in order to run tests headless on the command line. The easiest way (on a Mac) that I've found is to use homebrew:

brew install phantomjs

If you're not on a Mac, fear not, as installing PhantomJS is pretty painless for most environments. The important thing is that the binary be somewhere on your PATH.

Installation

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

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

Next, run bundle install.

Now, just mount jasmine-rails into your application by adding something like this to your routes.rb. The engine can be mounted to any path that you choose.

mount JasmineRails::Engine => "/specs" if defined?(JasmineRails)

Configuration

In order to run any specs, you'll need a Jasmine configuration in spec/javascripts/support/jasmine.yml. Here's an example from this repo's dummy project.

# path to parent directory of src_files
# relative path from Rails.root
# defaults to app/assets/javascripts
src_dir: "app/assets/javascripts"

# list of file expressions to include as source files
# relative path from src_dir
src_files:
 - "application.{js,coffee}"

# path to parent directory of spec_files
# relative path from Rails.root
# defaults to spec/javascripts
spec_dir: spec/javascripts

# list of file expressions to include as helpers into spec runner
# relative path from spec_dir
helpers:
  - "helpers/**/*.{js,coffee}"

# list of file expressions to include as specs into spec runner
# relative path from spec_dir
spec_files:
  - "**/*[Ss]pec.{js,coffee}"

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 testsuite.

# 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/spec_helper.js and app/assets/javascripts/foo.js
//= require helpers/spec_helper
//= 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.

Running from the command line

If you were to run:

RAILS_ENV=test 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:

RAILS_ENV=test 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 testsuite 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 spec/tmp/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" spec/tmp/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.