The features/support/env.rb file provides configurations for running cucumber tests. Spork is used here to speed up the tests (or specifically, loading the environment for the tests). Spork and Cucumber both have blocks that may be used to judiciously load information or reset the database. 'Before' and 'After' blocks are run for each cucumber s…

features-support-env.rb

require 'rubygems'
require 'spork'
#uncomment the following line to use spork with the debugger
#require 'spork/ext/ruby-debug'

...

require File.expand_path("./config/environment.rb")

...

Spork.prefork do

  ...

  ActionController::Base.allow_rescue = false

  ...

  Before('@no-txn,@selenium,@culerity,@celerity') do
    # I added this block and changed to transaction because @javascript was truncating most of my tables
    #DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation, {:except => %w[groups]}
    DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
  end

  # <<< 2: runs for each @javascript scenario
  # leave these :except tables alone; they shouldn't be changing and so they don't need to be truncated
  # is there such a thing as :only option?  Perhaps that would be a better approach.
  Before('@javascript') do
    DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation, {:except => %w[groups categories category_types content_types content_type_groups]}
  end

end

Spork.each_run do
  # This code will be run each time you run your specs.
  ActionController::Base.allow_rescue = false
  Cucumber::Rails::World.use_transactional_fixtures = true

  if defined?(ActiveRecord::Base)
    begin
      DatabaseCleaner.clean_with :truncation
      silence_stream(STDOUT) do
        require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '../../db/seeds.rb')            # <<< 1: db/seeds.rb loaded
      end
      DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :transaction
    rescue LoadError => ignore_if_database_cleaner_not_present
    end
  end
end