It was a nice trip to MiniSpec. It has its points, but it also severely lacks the concept of naming examples, tag them, and it is more or less unusable for documenting examples.
It also lacks powerful instrumentation: parameters, ability of running a spec by specifying a line number, etc.
Spin is a very good preforking rspec runner. It spins up the rails app, and runs specs on forked copies. Muck like Spork, but it does this totally unobtrusively. Sadly it doesn't handle cucumber ATM.
Cukes is a powerful tool after all. You have to cuke it right, however. There are good resources about it, like 'Cuking it right', or Hashrocket Book Club's episode on Cucumber.
Steak / Capybara is very powerful too, but they can't communicate with the business.
Capistrano and Vlad do a good job if you have enough time to have your assets compiled. Compiled assets should not go under version control, as bundle cached gems. However, if you don't have them on deployment, you'll need a couple of things on the server side (development environment, for example). Use a packaging server instead.
- Servers are maintained through puppet (server)
- Applications are packaged by fpm gem to deb format, published to a ppa repo.
- Deb packages are generated by a packager
- cheapo: shallow clone locally, doing cleanups and asset packaging
- reasonable: vagrant box (using target system, also good for rbenv debianization)
- pro: separate packaging server with web interface
Deployment is done in two steps: publishing a package, and re-running puppet agent on the client.
Bootstrap is a cool piece of software. It allows a very simple and elegant way to bootstrap (sic!) your new web app. 978 is over.