setting request headers in selenium

Question

I\'m attempting to set the request header \'Referer\' to spoof a request coming from another site. We need the ability test that a specific referrer is used, which returns a

Answer 1

Had the same issue today, except that I needed to set different referer per test. I ended up using a middleware and a class to pass headers to it. Thought I'd share (or maybe there's a cleaner solution?):

lib/request_headers.rb:

class CustomHeadersHelper
  cattr_accessor :headers
end

class RequestHeaders
  def initialize(app, helper = nil)
    @app, @helper = app, helper
  end

  def call(env)
    if @helper
      headers = @helper.headers

      if headers.is_a?(Hash)
        headers.each do |k,v|
          env["HTTP_#{k.upcase.gsub("-", "_")}"] = v
        end
      end
    end

    @app.call(env)
  end
end

---

config/initializers/middleware.rb

require 'request_headers'

if %w(test cucumber).include?(Rails.env)
  Rails.application.config.middleware.insert_before Rack::Lock, "RequestHeaders", CustomHeadersHelper
end

---

spec/support/capybara_headers.rb

require 'request_headers'

module CapybaraHeaderHelpers
  shared_context "navigating within the site" do
    before(:each) { add_headers("Referer" => Capybara.app_host + "/") }
  end

  def add_headers(custom_headers)
    if Capybara.current_driver == :rack_test
      custom_headers.each do |name, value|
        page.driver.browser.header(name, value)
      end
    else
      CustomHeadersHelper.headers = custom_headers
    end
  end
end

---

spec/spec_helper.rb

...
config.include CapybaraHeaderHelpers

Then I can include the shared context wherever I need, or pass different headers in another before block. I haven't tested it with anything other than Selenium and RackTest, but it should be transparent, as header injection is done before the request actually hits the application.