Testing error pages in Rails with Rspec + Capybara

The problematic setting in the test.rb is not only the

consider_all_requests_local = false

but also

config.action_dispatch.show_exceptions = true

If you set this you should be able to test the error. I was not able to use it in an around filter.

Have a look for http://agileleague.com/blog/rails-3-2-custom-error-pages-the-exceptions_app-and-testing-with-capybara/

If you want to do it and don't want to change config/environments/test.rb, you can follow the solution from this post.

the config.consider_all_requests_local = false setting would need to be set in config/environments/test.rb in the same way you have done for your development one.

If you don't want to do this for all tests, perhaps an rspec around filter would be useful to set the state before the test and restore afterwards like so:

# /spec/features/not_found_spec.rb
require 'spec_helper'
describe 'not found page' do
  around :each do |example|
     Rails.application.config.consider_all_requests_local = false
     example.run
     Rails.application.config.consider_all_requests_local = true
  end

  it 'should respond with 404 page' do
    visit '/foo'
    page.should have_content('not found')
  end
end