Step by Step - Cucumber, WatiR and Ruby installation tips

There are few road blocks you hit when you go about the process of installing Cucumber, Watir and Ruby the first time, you have to search all the information and then as you install there are some things that work while some dont , I just thought it may be a good idea to consolidate the information in one place for myself if i do run into this situation of having to install this again. I have tried and tested this thrice and use the same process to install our test agents.

• Installing Ruby

#Tip – Choosing the version of Ruby installer

Watir is stable with Ruby 1.8.7 so dont carried away and install 1.9.x of ruby , you learn the hard way that it is not going to work properly.

See Http://watir.com/installation for updates on when 1.9.x support will be provided. Go to http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/74293/rubyinstaller-1.8.7-p334.exe download the exe and run the installer. I chose the installation folder to be called just ruby as I want to avoid installing multiple versions for now.

 

• Ruby Path

Check if "c:\ruby\bin" is included in the path (else run PATH=%PATH%;c:\ruby\bin at the command prompt)

• Installing the Dev Kit for Ruby

Download http://github.com/downloads/oneclick/rubyinstaller/DevKit-tdm-32-4.5.1-20101214-1400-sfx.exe .

1. Click on it to extract files to a folder <DEV-KIT-FOLDER>.
2. Open a command prompt for the <DEV-KIT-FOLDER>.
3. Run the command “ruby dk.rb init”
4. Run the command “ruby dk.rb install”

Not sure if you need this but run a “gem update system” and it should say Nothing to update :).

• Installing gems

Now at the command prompt

1. Run “gem install cucumber”.
2. Run “gem install watir”
3. Run “gem install “win32console”
4. Run “gem install rspec”

• Installing ANSI con – if you are unable to see colours on your console window when you run a cucumber feature, you may need to install ANSICON

1. Go to http://adoxa.110mb.com/ansicon . Download AnsiCon 140.
2. Extract the files.
3. Open a command prompt for the folder you have extracted the files in
   cd to x64 folder if you use a 64 bit machine or x86 folder if you use a 32 bit machine
   type "ansicon.exe -i"
   Close the command prompt , open a new one

This should be sufficient to run cucumber features now. In a weeks time I will post a project framework with some useful stuff for ruby / selenium / cucumber which can be downloaded so you can go about building tests quickly

ScrewTurn Wiki

I was looking for a some kind of ASP.Net sample site purely to demo some BDD scenarios at work, but then I wanted to do it on a site which is more complex than the usual ASP.Net sample site made of Customer/Order.

I found a couple of Wikis, but the one that caught my eye was ScrewTurn Wiki. First things first it is free under the GPLv2 license (for more details on commercial licenses see Commercial License Help)

The installation took less than a few minutes using the Microsoft Web Platform installer, You install the Wiki in one of two modes file system storage mode or SqlServer storage mode (just use SqlExpress). To choose which mode you want to install. See Installation Help for more details. Apparently you can go with file storage mode and then switch to the SqlServer data storage mode later (Data Migration)

The fact that you can manage the ScrewTurn Wiki using Microsoft WebMatrix is simply brilliant. The ease of use and ability to be able to publish the Wiki is simply useful. You can pretty much configure your hosting details if you wanted to host something on the internet and keep pushing your changes.

Now for Plugins, quite a lot of them seem to be available. There are vast number of navigational, text editing and data provider plugins. In addition to this you can customise different portions of the Wiki using your own providers , this seems like one of those things that was given a great deal of thought. See Custom Providers

I guess I am very impressed by what the Wiki offers, but looking at the features I am actually wondering if a product which was a Wiki is evolving into a CMS? Not sure, cant say I am bothered either, the only reason I raised that concern is the Wiki as is, is pretty simplistic and this is what appealed to me, building too much into could make it bulky and complex. I am just a developer so I cant give an accurate view of what users of the Wiki would want. On the bright side there are some really new features that are coming and that can be leveraged. V4 CTP offers native Azure support which should be good if you wanted to use Cloud based services I guess. See Roadmap for more details