sunspot-rails-tester

This gem allows you to "turn on" solr for certain portions of your tests. For the code that does not use solr, you would want to "stub" sunspot to avoid unneeded indexing.

Here is an example RSpec 2 spec_helper.rb:

$original_sunspot_session = Sunspot.session

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.before do
    Sunspot.session = Sunspot::Rails::StubSessionProxy.new($original_sunspot_session)
  end

  config.before :each, :solr => true do
    Sunspot::Rails::Tester.start_original_sunspot_session
    Sunspot.session = $original_sunspot_session
    Sunspot.remove_all!
  end
end

Let's go through what the above code does.

$original_sunspot_session stores the original sunspot session. By default, sunspot_rails uses the SessionProxy::ThreadLocalSessionProxy.
In the first before block, we set the session to a stub session for every example. Sunspot::Rails::StubSessionProxy is just a dummy class that skips indexing.
In the second before block, we use RSpec 2's metadata feature by adding :solr => true. Any example or example group with this metadata will run the original sunspot session. Sunspot::Rails::Tester.start_original_sunspot_session starts the solr instance if it's not running.

Here is an example spec that utilizes sunspot-rails-tester:

require 'spec_helper'

describe 'search page' do
  it 'highlights the active tab in the navigation' do
    # uses the stub session
  end

  it 'finds and displays a person', :solr => true do
    # uses actual solr - indexing will happen
  end
end

Spork

To get this gem to work with Spork, all you need to do is move the start_original_sunspot_session line out of the RSpec.configure block:

$original_sunspot_session = Sunspot.session
Sunspot::Rails::Tester.start_original_sunspot_session

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.before do
    Sunspot.session = Sunspot::Rails::StubSessionProxy.new($original_sunspot_session)
  end

  config.before :each, :solr => true do
    Sunspot.session = $original_sunspot_session
    Sunspot.remove_all!
  end
end

Thanks

The following articles served as guidance and inspiration for this gem:

License

sunspot-rails-tester is released under the MIT license. See LICENSE for details.