RSpec Rails

rspec-rails extends Rails’ built-in testing framework to support rspec examples for requests, controllers, models, views, helpers, mailers and routing. It is a thin framework around Rails own helpers and you can check their documentation for help as well.

Rails

rspec-rails 6 supports Rails 6.1 to 7.0. For earlier versions of Rails, you should use rspec-rails-5 for Rails 5.2 and 6.0, rspec-rails-4 for Rails 5.x, and rspec-rails 3 for even older versions.

Install

gem install rspec-rails

This installs the following gems:

rspec
rspec-core
rspec-expectations
rspec-mocks
rspec-rails

Configure

Add rspec-rails to the :test and :development groups in the Gemfile:

group :test, :development do
  gem 'rspec-rails', '~> 6.0.0'
end

It needs to be in the :development group to expose generators and rake tasks without having to type RAILS_ENV=test.

Now you can run:

bundle exec rails generate rspec:install

This adds the spec directory and some skeleton files, including a .rspec file.

You can also customize the default spec path with --default-path option:

bundle exec rails generate rspec:install --default-path behaviour

Issues

The documentation for rspec-rails is a work in progress. We’ll be adding Cucumber features over time, and clarifying existing ones. If you have specific features you’d like to see added, find the existing documentation incomplete or confusing, or, better yet, wish to write a missing Cucumber feature yourself, please submit an issue or a pull request.