making VCR use less confusing for new users

[s...@agileventures.org]

Hi everyone,

We've been using VCR in our rails projects for a long time (and now puffing billy as well) and I'm concerned about how confusing cached network recordings are for new contributors that we onboard.

We also seem to end up with a fair few new network cache files when tests fail and so on, which show up in `git status`.  New contributors wonder what these files are for, try to add the cache directories to .gitignore, or do other strange things.

We've recently introduced a rake task `rake vcr_billy_caches:reset` to make it easy to reset the caches to the way they are in the current branch, but I wonder if there isn't some better long term solution.

I wonder if we're using VCR incorrectly, or perhaps not updating our cached network files frequently enough.  I'm a little scared to delete large swathes of recorded files for the extra work that might pop up in terms of ensuring that everything works again, but perhaps I'm being silly.  It's just that it's all volunteer time, so well, anyway.  Here are the two main OS projects I'm running that use VCR:

https://github.com/AgileVentures/LocalSupport

https://github.com/AgileVentures/WebSiteOne

I've added sections to our contributing docs, but I feel like all my text should probably be replaced with images or a video: https://github.com/AgileVentures/LocalSupport/blob/develop/CONTRIBUTING.md#acceptance-testing--caching

I just wondered if others had similar experiences and any suggestions.

Many thanks in advance

Best, Sam