How to Setup Rspec Instead of Test::Unit in Rails

For a new project, you can setup the Rspec test suite in three steps.

First, generate the project without Test::Unit (which is what the -T is):

rails new new_project_name -T

Next, make sure you have Rspec in your Gemfile:

...
group :development, :test do
  ...
  gem 'rspec-rails'
end

Finally, use the Rails installer to generate the specs:

rails g rspec:install

To check that this worked, you should see a spec directory instead of test from the project root:

ls new_project_name/spec

Don’t forget to prepare the db for testing after you run any new migrations:

rake db:test:prepare

Check out the Rspec docs for more details.