Testing Sessions with Sinatra

Tags: technology

I've got a sinatra-based app that relies on sessions and I need to test them. After doing a little digging, here was the solution I was able to come up with:

1. Make sure that you're setting your RACK_ENV to 'test' (I do this in my Rakefile)
2. Disable sessions in your app when in test?
3. when you make a request that requires a session, pass 'rack.session' => {} in the environment hash

See an example of this in my app: Picklespears

Here's the breakdown of the code,

In the Rakefile:

ENV['RACK_ENV']='test'

In the app (picklespears.rb)

if test?
  set :sessions, false
else
  set :sessions, true
end

And finally, in the test itself (test/test_player.rb)

post '/player/update', { :name => 'new_name' }, 'rack.session' => { :player_id => player.id }