capybara matchers always eval to TRUE in rspec. Why?

Question

Something strange is going on with capybara and rspec, which I'm setting up on Ruby 1.9.3, Padrino 0.10.7, rspec 2.11.0, capybara 2.0.2.

A basic Padrino project set up haml and rspec (no custom code, yet!) other than just enough to load a "/" page (which I verified does render as expected by "puts page.content" within the specs below). Here's the simple spec. "Bogus" doesn't exist, but "Home" does...note that when I puts to console, the expected true/false are CORRECT, but for some reason, the matchers aren't seeing the true/false correctly.

The one clue I have so far lies in the 2nd spec using should have_content('Bogus') which is reporting that Proc is expected...

./spec/controllers/hello_world_spec.rb

require 'spec_helper'

require 'capybara'
require 'capybara/rspec'

describe 'The HelloWorld App', :type => :feature do

  context "per documentation" do 
    it "has bogus content" do
      visit '/'
      page.has_content?('Bogus')
    end

    it "does not have bogus content" do
      visit '/'
      page.should have_content("Bogus")
    end
  end

  context "should tests" do 
    it "has bogus content" do
      visit '/'
      page.has_content?('Bogus').should == true
    end

    it "does not have bogus content" do
      visit '/'
      page.has_content?('Bogus').should == false
    end
  end

  context "variables" do 
    it "has bogus content" do
      visit '/'
      result = page.has_content?('Bogus')
      puts result
      result.should == true
    end

    it "has Home content (expect TRUE!)" do
      visit '/'
      result = page.has_content?('Home')
      puts result
      result.should == true
    end

    it "does not have bogus content" do
      visit '/'
      result = page.has_content?('Bogus')
      puts result
      result.should == false
    end
  end
end

spec_helper.rb

PADRINO_ENV = 'test' unless defined?(PADRINO_ENV)
require File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../config/boot")

def app
  ##
  # You can handle all padrino applications using instead:
  Padrino.application
  # Askme.tap do |app|
  # end
end

RSpec.configure do |conf|
  conf.include Rack::Test::Methods
  Capybara.app = app
end

Output:

11:40:57:website >> bundle exec rspec spec/app/controllers/hello_world_controller_spec.rb 
WARNING: Nokogiri was built against LibXML version 2.8.0, but has dynamically loaded 2.7.8

The HelloWorld App
  per documentation
    has bogus content
    does not have bogus content (FAILED - 1)
  should tests
    has bogus content
    does not have bogus content
  variables
false
    has bogus content
true
    has Home content (expect TRUE!)
false
    does not have bogus content

Failures:

  1) The HelloWorld App per documentation does not have bogus content
     Failure/Error: page.should have_content("Bogus")
     TypeError:
       wrong argument type Capybara::RSpecMatchers::HaveText (expected Proc)
     # ./spec/app/controllers/hello_world_controller_spec.rb:16:in `block (3 levels) in <top (required)>'

Finished in 1.66 seconds
7 examples, 1 failure

Failed examples:

rspec ./spec/app/controllers/hello_world_controller_spec.rb:14 # The HelloWorld App per documentation does not have bogus content

Answer 1

Turns out the culprit was having both "bacon" and "rspec" in the Gemfile. Capybara was being introduced to a project that utilized bacon for the test suite and examples being tried were rspec. Once bacon was removed from the bundled gems, the capybara specs ran per documentation.

Since the bacon scripts run more or less as-is under rspec, the project decision is to remove bacon and go with rspec for the test suite and make the minor tweaks to the bacon scripts to run all specs under rspec.