April 30, 2010

Using factory_girl and Rspec with Rails 3

Edit: As Wes pointed out, the problems I was having were related to using the beta’s of Rails, Rspec and Factory Girl. These are all resolved now, and the only trick is to make sure you use the Factory Girl Rails gem. Luckily that is as easy as dropping…

gem 'factory_girl_rails'` 

…in to your Gemfile. Thanks Wes.


Just like anything in Rails 3, start by editing my Gemfile to include Rspec and Factory Girl:

group :test do
  gem "rspec-rails", ">= 2.0.0.beta.8"
  gem 'factory_girl', :git => 'git://github.com/thoughtbot/factory_girl.git', :branch => 'rails3'
end

Then following the factory_girl documentation I created a new user factory in spec/factories but got hit with an unexpected error while factory_girl was running her find_definitions step:

/spec/factories/users.rb:1: uninitialized constant User (NameError)

The solution was simple. I noticed in the generated spec_helper Rspec was loading everything nested under spec/support. So I simply moved my factories directory to spec/support/factories and I saw the sweet red dots of failing tests.

Time to go make them specs pass.



🚀