How to get Cucumber/Capybara/Mechanize to work against external non-rails site

Question

I'm trying to do BDD on a Google App Script. I understand that in principle I should be able to use some combination of Cucumber, Capybara and Mechanize to do BDD on a non-rails external site. In this case I am trying to test a Google App Script I created. I've got the complete code so far in this project: https://github.com/tansaku/GoogleAppScriptBDD However I am currently stuck on this error: ``` rack-test requires a rack application, but none was given (ArgumentError) ``` I know that I don't want to use rack, and I have been searching forums and stack overflow, and so far my best guess something like this in my cucumber env file: ``` require 'capybara/cucumber' Capybara.run_server=false Capybara.current_driver = :mechanize Capybara.app_host = 'https://script.google.com/macros/s/AKfycbytA2xBsaQ0_FSJXNkPVXQekBnWD4hXPOaCjCT00wo/dev' ``` This SO post is relevant: How to use Cucumber to test non-Ruby, non-Rack API's But I would like to use Capybara since I am testing an HTML interface.…

Accepted Answer

If you are not using Rails, set Capybara.app to your rack app:

It was meant to be read as:

If the application that you are testing is a Rack app, but not Rails, set Capybara.app to your Rack app:

Capybara's README was updated as the result of this question.

As you want to run tests against external application, you should set `Capybara.app_host` instead of `Capybara.app`.

I haven't used capybara-mechanize but I think it may be not the best driver to use to test external non-Rack application. Mechanize inherits from Racktest and Racktest is for testing apps with Rack interface (mostly Rails). If your app doesn't have Rack interface, then capybara-mechanize may be not the best choice.

I recommend you to use the built-in selenium, poltergeist, capybara-webkit or terminus

Also your code can be written a bit nicer using `Capybara.configure`:

```
Capybara.configure do |config|
  config.run_server = false
  config.default_driver = :selenium
  config.app_host = 'https://www.google.com' # change url
end
```

How to get Cucumber/Capybara/Mechanize to work against external non-rails site

Solution

Problem