Quick Hits: Setting the User Agent Header in Webrat

If you’ve read the new PragProg beta e-book on RSpec, you may have read that you can set HTTP headers for your Webrat request like so:

Given /^I am browsing the site using Safari$/ do
  header "User-Agent" , "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_6; en-us)"
end

Like me, you may have found out the hard way that this doesn’t work. Webrat does not automagically apply these new HTTP headers to your request – they certainly don’t make it to my controller. What worked for me:

Given /^I am browsing the site using Safari$/ do
  headers["User-Agent"] = "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_6; en-us)"
end
 
When /^I visit my precious site$/ do
  get '/my/precious/path', my_query_string, headers
end

In the code above, headers is a method call that returns all the HTTP headers for your request. Just tack headers on as the third argument of your request, and you’re good to go.

Ruby/Hadoop talk on Tuesday

A note for interested parties: I (Brad) will be giving a short (10-15 minute) talk on using Ruby with Hadoop for distributed computing. The plan is to give an ultra-brief description of the MapReduce algorithm and Hadoop, show 2 examples of working code (including one with Wukong, Flip Kromers Hadoop Streaming wrapper), and closing notes on my attempts to use JRuby to create Hadoop jobs.

The talk will be on Tuesday at the NYC.rb meeting, 7:00 at Bway.net’s offices. Get there early for a seat, the last one was packed.