Chapter 12. Testing
Testing can spare you much of the work you learned to do in the previous chapter, replacing spot-check debugging with more structured and thorough repetitive testing. Ruby culture places a high value on testing, and Ruby and Rails have grown up with agile development methods where testing is assumed to be a normal part of development. While testing is a complicated subject worthy of a book or several, itâs definitely worthwhile to start including tests early in your project development, even while youâre still learning the Rails landscape.
Rails provides a number of facilities for creating and managing tests. This chapter will explore Railsâ basic testing setup and note some options for building more advanced test platforms. (Examples for this chapter are in ch12/students006.)
Note
Many developers use RSpec, an additional framework for testing noted at the end of this chapter, but itâs worth understanding the foundations provided in Rails itself.
Test Mode
Up to this point, all the code in this book has been run in development mode. Rails supports three different environments for running applications. Each of them has its own database, as well as its own settings:
- Development
Development is the default mode. In development mode, Rails loads and reloads code every time a request is made, making it easy for you to see changes without a cache getting in the way. Itâs also typical to use SQLite as the database, as Rails isnât going to be working at high speed ...
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