I'm trying out capybara with cucumber to get some better javascript test coverage. I have a lot of steps that check or use things from the Rails integration test helpers, for instance: assigns(:current_user).should_not be_nil No matter how I call assigns, even if I say something like p assigns it errors with: undefined method `template' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError) So, it seems that I can't do that anymore. Is there an alternative to introspecting what's going on in the controller, or maybe some way of at least running those steps in such a way that I have the integration test stuff back?