be_valid_asset

Provides be_valid_markup, be_valid_css and be_valid_feed matchers for RSpec controller and view tests.

Installation

To use be_valid_asset in your project, add it to your Gemfile:

gem 'be_valid_asset'

Add the following to spec/support/be_valid_asset.rb:

include BeValidAsset

BeValidAsset::Configuration.display_invalid_content = true
BeValidAsset::Configuration.enable_caching = true
BeValidAsset::Configuration.cache_path = Rails.root.join('tmp', 'be_valid_asset_cache')

Note: For older versions of RSpec you'll need to require be_valid_asset.rb from spec_helper.rb.

Usage

Markup validation

It can be used to test a Capybara Session object in a request spec as follows:

scenario "Visiting foo and validate markup" do
  visit foo_path
  page.should be_valid_markup
end

or an ActionController Response object:

describe FooController do
  render_views

  describe "GET 'index'" do
    it "renders valid markup" do
      get :index
      response.should be_valid_markup
    end
  end
end

or to test a string:

it "is valid markup" do
  html = File.read(Rails.root.join('public', 'index.html'))
  html.should be_valid_markup
end

It is also possible to validate an html fragment. This assumes xhtml-1.0 strict.

it "is valid HTML" do
  string = "<p>This is an html fragment</p>"
  string.should be_valid_markup_fragment
end

CSS validation

CSS files can be validated as follows:

it "is valid CSS" do
  css = File.read(Rails.root.join('public', 'stylesheets', 'main.css'))
  css.should be_valid_css
end

be_valid_css takes an optional parameter specifying the CSS profile to test against. It defaults to testing against CSS 2.1. It can be set to any of the profiles supported by the CSS validator (e.g. css1, css2, css21, css3). There are also the following shortcut methods:

• be_valid_css1 => CSS 1.0
• be_valid_css2 => CSS 2.1
• be_valid_css3 => CSS 3.0

Feed validation

RSS and Atom feeds can be validated from a response, or a string, in the same way as for html or CSS. e.g.

describe FooController do
  render_views

  describe "GET 'index.rss'" do
    it "is a valid feed" do
      get 'index.rss'
      response.should be_valid_feed
    end
  end
end

There are also aliased methods be_valid_rss and be_valid_atom that do the same thing.

Environment Variables

Disabling network tests

If the environment variable NONET is set to true, then all tests with no cached response available will be marked as pending.

http_proxy

If you need to use a proxy server to access the validator service, set the environment variable http_proxy.

Configuration options

The following can be set in spec/support/be_valid_asset.rb:

Display Full source for failures:

BeValidAsset::Configuration.display_invalid_content = false
# defaults to false

Display surrounding source for failures:

This will cause it to output the failing line, and n surrounding lines (defaults to 5)

BeValidAsset::Configuration.display_invalid_lines = true
BeValidAsset::Configuration.display_invalid_lines_count = 10
# defaults to false and 5 lines

Change validator host/path:

BeValidAsset::Configuration.markup_validator_host = 'validator.w3.org'
BeValidAsset::Configuration.markup_validator_path = '/check'
BeValidAsset::Configuration.css_validator_host = 'jigsaw.w3.org'
BeValidAsset::Configuration.css_validator_path = '/css-validator/validator'
BeValidAsset::Configuration.feed_validator_host = 'validator.w3.org'
BeValidAsset::Configuration.feed_validator_path = '/feed/check.cgi'

If you are doing more than the occasional check, you should run your own copy of the validator, and use that.

Instructions here: http://validator.w3.org/docs/install.html, http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/DOWNLOAD.html or https://github.com/w3c/css-validator-standalone and http://validator.w3.org/feed/about.html#where

Caching

be_valid_asset can cache the responses from the validator to save look-ups for documents that haven't changed. To use this feature, it must be enabled, and a cache path must be set:

BeValidAsset::Configuration.enable_caching = true
BeValidAsset::Configuration.cache_path = Rails.root.join('tmp', 'be_valid_asset_cache')

By default, cache busters for href and src attribute values are stripped like src="/images/test.jpg?8171717" is cached as src="/images/test.jpg". If this is unwanted, add the following to the configuration file:

BeValidAsset::Configuration.markup_cache_modifiers = []

Markup modification prior to validation

There might be specific parts of your markup that have not yet been standardised and you still want to validate the rest of your markup. There may be elements of your markup that causes validation to fail. If you want to ignore specific markup that causes failures but validate the rest, regular expressions can be used to modify the markup prior to validation. Ideally this would not be necessary, but with emerging standards like the HTML Responsive Images Extension sometimes it is potentially the best solution until the markup validator is updated. If you are using the srcset attribute on an img tag and want to remove it prior to validation, set the configuration as shown below. markup_modifiers is a 2 dimensional array, where each constituent array has two elements that provide the arguments to a call to gsub.

BeValidAsset::Configuration.markup_modifiers = [[/ srcset=".* \dx"/, '']]

Issues / Feature Requests

Please use the Github issue tracker to track any bugs/feature requests.

Licensing

This was originally based on a blog post here: http://www.anodyne.ca/2007/09/28/rspec-custom-matchers-and-be_valid_xhtml/

This is distributed under the MIT Licence, see LICENSE.txt for the details.