How to get started with unit testing in Rails?

I want to learn how to write unit tests for a Rails App. Where do I start? All the tutorials on Google are old, back from 2开发者_运维知识库007, and there seem to be an abundance of choice but not a preferred solution.

Right now most people seem to be using Rspec for unit testing and Cucumber for integration testing. You can see a fairly recent poll here where 87% chose Rspec in a survey.

A great book for Rspec and Cucumber is The Rspec Book written by the current maintainer of Rspec. It goes over both Rspec and Cucumber.

Railscasts also has a few relevant screencasts. Cucmber1, Cucumber2

Many people seem to love Cucumber but it doesn't seem as useful if you don't have a client you're doing work for. Most of my projects are side projects I do myself so these days I'm looking into Steak instead of Cucumber. This will allow me to use Rspec for unit tests and Steak for integration tests and reduces some complexity/tedium that is introduced when using Cucumber.

People have said that it doesn't really matter which testing framework you pick, it's more important that you START TESTING. I agree with that but hopefully these resources will help you get started.

However, one thing you probably want to avoid from the very start are fixtures. Use factories instead and check out this Railscasts episode on it.

UPDATE: Steak is no longer necessary and the same functionality is baked into Rspec.

I'd suggest starting with the Rspec Book by David Chelimsky and friends. It goes over the various types of testing, why you should test and runs through various examples that show you good practices as well as giving you guidelines for what to avoid.

Rspec is very popular and preferred by many over the default rails test suite. Most material I've read that goes over using the default test suit ends with an introduction to Rspec and how it makes life simpler.

If you want to do it the proper way, you should use others testing frameworks like Rspec, Cucumber or shoulda. This way you will write Unit Tests in a BDD context. Those frameworks are recent so obviously the documentation that you will find about them are recent enough! Finally, I'd suggest you to read this great blog post from Sarah Mei about the outside-in approach combining Rspec/Cucumber, that's how I was convinced to use these frameworks, she really explains very well how you should approach the tests!