At work we like to do lots of testing and behaviour driven development since we have a number of stakeholders and institutions all working on the same application. To make sure everyone is getting what they want we’re using cucumber to write our specifications; that is we’re primarily doing outside in developement of our system.
As such we like to test things in a near production like environment… Having chosen to use capybara-webkit to test the interface (at a very functional and simplistic level) on our workstations. I decided to test drive the vagrant enviroment that I had been working on the past few months. Btw, this environment is bootstrapped with ansible, I’m a much happier person since I ditched puppet.
Annoyingly in RHEL6 and friends QT is a little bit behind the current times, we needed at least QT4.7 to run the javascript tests (which rely on webkit). The first an obvious thing was to uninstall qt from the base system and then install qt47 from atrpms-testing.
Little did I know that tomcat6 depends on redhat-lsb which in turn depends on qt-x11 and so on… My plans on testing and developing our application in a near production environment almost got shot.
In the end the solution was to test the java script components with either selenium or better yet poltergeist for capybara. We chose poltergeist as it runs headless. This isn’t really a problem of cucumber/capybara, but rather a problem of RHEL6 and friends with old packages.
…after sometime I have a half-way there set of ansible playbooks to get me to where I need to be in a virtual environment…
…less rant …