wicz journal

The other day I was writing some Cucumber features for a Rails app that relies on subdomains for creating per-user contexts. It seems that Webrat can't handle subdomains and redirects the way I expected.

A Little Background

I hate when I have to access 127.0.0.1 or localhost:3000. Typing all these numbers, dots and colon doesn't feel comfortable at all. I like domain names, and since I am developing a subdomain-aware app, I want to be able to access using names. That said, I configured my Firefox with a PAC file that routes *.local to my server running at 127.0.0.1:3000 (oh man, if you're still using /etc/hosts you're so 2000-and-late! =p).

Here's how it looks like. You can grab more details here.

function FindProxyForURL(url, host) {
    if (shExpMatch(host, "*.local")) {
        return "PROXY 127.0.0.1:3000";
    }
    return "DIRECT";
}

Now I am able to access johndoe.app.local, foobar.app.local, etc. No numbers, no colon, just NAMES! =)

My ApplicationController implements a simple before_filter that checks for a valid account, otherwise redirects to a fallback page. Something like this:

before_filter :account_required

def current_account
  @current_account ||= Account.find_by_subdomain(request.subdomains.first)
end

def account_required
  unless current_account
    flash[:error] = :account_not_found
    redirect_to fallback_url
  end
end

You can have more on subdomains as accounts here, here and here.

The Scenario

The feature was a simple sign in.

Given the foobar account
When I go to foobar's sign in page 
And I fill in "user_session[email]" with "foobar@test.com"
And I fill in "user_session[password]" with "1234"
And I press "Sign in"
Then I should be on dashboard

And I should see "Welcome, foobar"

The Caveats

By default, Webrat uses www.example.com as host for testing. Since it was trying to sign in to a account that doesn't exist (the Given creates foobar), it was being redirect to the fallback url, so it couldn't find the form fields. Knowing that Webrat's RailsAdapter uses ActionController::Integration::Session, we can easily solve this by overwriting the host name to use in the next request. Our Given should look like this:

Given /^the foobar account$/ do
  Foobar.create(...)
  host! "foobar.app.local"
end

Now being able to fill in the form, after submitting it, I still wasn't sent to the expected page. I was willing to see the dashboard, but it was rendering /session, which means I wasn't authenticating at all, even passing valid credentials... WTF!? Then dumping the ActionController::Response object, I verified that it was actually redirecting (@status => "302 Found"), so I decided to investigate Webrat.

Loading mentions Retweet