17 August 2014

Solano CI Intermittent Failed Builds With Capybara

My company has been using Solano CI (formerly Tddium) for Continuous Integration and Rspec/Capybara for testing our Rails apps. We have Solano CI linked to Github, whenever we push a branch or a new commit to a branch, it kicks off a build on Solano CI and runs all of the Rspec/Capybara specs. When I first started on this project, we were always having problems with builds intermittently failing. However, these specs would pass every time when running Rspec locally. A CI server is not a useful tool if it's not reliable. I began to look into what was causing these intermittently failing builds and I noticed that all of the failures were coming from feature specs. Since feature specs are handled by Capybara, I figured the failures had something to do with the way Capybara was running on Solano CI. After some digging and a conversation with Solano support, we were able to get the intermittently failing builds to stop. The tests are run in parallel on Solano CI for speed, sometimes the 2 second Capybara default wait time was not long enough. Most of the time the builds would pass, but sometimes the content or element wasn't on the page within the 2 seconds time causing the feature spec to fail. We changed the value from 2 seconds to 8 seconds and kicked off a few builds. Every build that passes locally is now passing without any issues on Solano CI. In the code example below the Capybara default wait time is only adjusted if the ENV is set to TDDIUM. If you need to adjust the Capybara default wait time because of intermittently failing Capybara feature specs, just add this to your spec_helper.rb or rails_helper.rb if you are using Rspec 3.

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if ENV['TDDIUM'] #only set this config on Solano CI
  #set longer capybara wait time to prevent failed builds on SolanoCI
  Capybara.default_wait_time = 8
end
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