The Tarantula is a fuzzy spider. It crawls your rails app, fuzzing inputs and analyzing what comes back. We have pointed Tarantula at about 20 Rails applications, both commercial and open source, and have never failed to uncover flaws.

How does your Rails app stand up? It's easy to find out. Install the plugin, and create a Tarantula integration test: (Update: Note that Tarantula integration tests live in test/tarantula so that you can treat them separately in your cruise builds. For a substantial app or fixture set Tarantula can take a while to run!)

  # somewhere in your test
  require 'relevance/tarantula'            

  # customize to match your security setup  
  def test_with_login
    post '/sessions/create', :password => 'your-pass'
    assert_response :redirect
    assert_redirected_to '/'
    follow_redirect!
    t = tarantula_crawler(self)
    t.crawl '/'
  end

Then rake tarantula:test, and then start looking through the Failures section of the HTML report.

Tarantula is just a baby now, but we plan to feed it until it is a lot bigger and meaner. Suggestions and contributions are welcome via the Relevance Open Source Trac.

Hat tip to Courtenay, whose SpiderTest plugin inspired me to go down this road. Also congrats to Mephisto, which is the best behaved app under Tarantula to date (only three problems, all minor broken windows).