Okay, here is what should be a fairly straightforward and easy to understand hack of Capybara that yields the desired behavior, namely to be able to create a new session each time you switch subdomains. This is useful for sites where a user registers on one domain (which results in a subdomain being created for his account) and then ends up needing to navigate over to that subdomain.
First of all (and this part is fairly common to the other solutions out there) go ahead and give yourself a way to change Capybara.default_host in a Cucumber step. I did it like this:
Then /^I switch the subdomain to (\w+)$/ do |s|
Capybara.default_host = "#{s}.smackaho.st"
end
Stick this step into your Cucumber feature at the point where you want the new subdomain to be used. For example:
When I open the email
Then I should see "http://acme.rightbonus.com/users/confirmation" in the email body
Given I switch the subdomain to acme
When I follow "Click here to finish setting up your account" in the email
Then I should be on the user confirmation page for acme
Now for the magical monkeypatching that makes this work. Basically, you want Capybara to be smart enough to detect when the subdomain has changed and reset its RackTest session object.
# features/support/capybara.rb
class Capybara::Driver::RackTest
# keep track of the default host you started with
def initialize(app)
raise ArgumentError,
"rack-test requires a rack application, but none was given" unless app
@app = app
@default_host = Capybara.default_host
end
def process(method, path, attributes = {})
reset_if_host_has_changed
path = ["http://", @default_host, path].join
return if path.gsub(/^#{request_path}/, '') =~ /^#/
path = request_path + path if path =~ /^\?/
send(method, to_binary(path), to_binary( attributes ), env)
follow_redirects!
end
private
def build_rack_mock_session # :nodoc:
puts "building a new Rack::MockSession for " + Capybara.default_host
Rack::MockSession.new(app, Capybara.default_host || "www.example.com")
end
def reset_if_host_has_changed
if @default_host != Capybara.default_host
reset! # clears the existing MockSession
@default_host = Capybara.default_host
end
end
end
This patch works with Capybara 0.4.1.1 and will probably not work with different versions unless modified. Good luck.