Testing SSL with Capybara and Selenium

I am using Capybara with Selenium as JS engine to write acceptance tests for a Ruby on Rails application. In some controllers I am forcing SSL with the “force_ssl” filter from Rails. By running the tests with Selenium this caused some problems. Selenium is launching Firefox and calls the URL https://127.0.0.1:3000/signin. Of course there is no SSL for localhost! This causes an error and the test fails.

I did some research for this. There are some tickets on GitHub and StackOverflow to this. but nothing what actually solves the core problem. For right now I just solved it, with running the filter only in production mode and not in test mode.

force_ssl if Rails.env.production?

Now Firefox is launching on http://127.0.0.1:3000/signin.