Hack your Rspec setup using tags

18 Jun 2015 I ran into an issue in rspec the other day where I had a before block to setup about 10 different tests, but I needed to write one more that was similar enough that it belonged in the same context but it required slightly different setup so the before block I already defined.

What to do? I could break out the existing tests into a nested context block and use the setup there, then do another nexted context block for my new test, but I really didn’t want to do that because all these tests should belong in the same context. I just wanted to skip the before block on one specific test.

Rspec tags to the rescue!

In this case, my new test was a JS test and all others were not (which is partly why the setup was different. So, the test was already tagged js: true, and in mybefore` block, I modified it like so:

before(:each) do |test|
  # Run this only on tests NOT tagged with js: true
  if test.example.metadata[:js] == nil
    # Existing setup code
  end
end

Works like a charm, and I still have all my related tests within the same context like I wanted.

Hat Tip: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27864080/how-can-i-skip-some-setup-for-specific-rspec-tags