Sinatra: green way.

Sinatra is one of the most popular micro frameworks for ruby, its a easy and quickly way to create web applications.

Cucumber is an powerful tool to create user stories and acceptance tests

Together they are an quickly and efficient way to create web applications.

In this post we'll create our first sinatra application in 'outside-in' development with cucumber, I mean, in the green way.

First Sinatra application.

First of all we need to create an our basic environment. I like use one gemset per project Then we need create the application's directory called greenway. Navigate to that directory and create a file called Gemfile. Edit this file so its looks like the example below:

source 'http://rubygems.org'

gem 'sinatra'
gem 'cucumber'
gem 'cucumber-sinatra'
gem 'capybara'
gem 'rspec'

With rvm you can use diferents rubies and gemset for each project. If you don't know rvm. What are you waiting for? RVM

Now we can install our gems bundle install

if you doesn't have installed bundle. Install it with gem install bundler

Now we need to create our sinatra application, configure cucumber, define the web_steps and so on. Well go ahead

cucumber-sinatra init --app Hello src/hello.rb

Done! cucumber-sinatra is a gem that do most of the configuration work for us. For more info you can visit cucumber-sinatra

Write tests

Now we can write our cucumber test, yes, I said test

Inside features directory create a new file called hello.feature In this file write something like:

Feature: Cucumber web testing
  In Order to verify if my app works
  As A developer
  I want to see my home page

  Scenario: View hello page
    Given I am on the home page
    Then I should see "It's alive!"

Then run the test: cucumber feature/hello.feature

And... Fail! No worry, this is expected. Now we are ready to write code to pass the test.

Write Code

This is the moment to write the code to pass the test. Open the file src/hello.rb and edit it to look like the following

require 'sinatra/base'

class Hello < Sinatra::Base
  get '/' do
    "It's alive!"
  end
end

And run the test again cucumber feature/hello.feature

We're green. If you want to see your web application, you can do it with rackup -p 4567

Now you can visit it on "localhost:4567/" in your browser

Congrats for you first Sinatra application in the green way. To celebrate, I left you with Frank

References

Cucumber Behavior Driven Development tool.

Siantra a DSL for quickly creating web applications in Ruby.

Cucumber-Sinatra helpful gem to initialize a cucumber environment for a sinatra application.

RVM Command line tool to easily install, manage and work with multiple ruby environments.

anarosas/sinatra-green_way

Sinatra: green way.

First Sinatra application.

Write tests

Write Code

References