CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubyrspec
Cyril Duchon-Doris
Cyril Duchon-Doris

Reputation: 13949

Rspec - where is the extra configuration for test environment?

I am using the default test for different purposes and I have decided to make a specific rspec environment configuration for running the test suite.

However, I discovered that upon changing to ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= rspec in my rails_helper.rb file, suddenly a LOT of things are going wrong, constants are not being loaded (FactoryGirl, DatabaseCleaner, etc. throw uninitialized constant errors)

My question is, where is the code that loads those guys in test environment ? Since I am planning to use this stage for other purposes than running automatic tests, I'm afraid this "out of nowhere" added configuration might not work well with what I am planning to do.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 881

Answers (2)

Anthony E
Anthony E

Reputation: 11235

From the perspective of Rails, the test environment is configured and loaded like any other environment such as production or development. You can see this prefixing RAILS_ENV=test to many of the native Rails commands e.g. RAILS_ENV=test rails c will load the rails console for the test environment, and so on. Similarly, all test-specific configuration within Rails is defined in test.rb in your config/environments folder.

However, when you run your specs with rspec spec, you're actually starting the RSpec runner, which, for most intents and purposes, runs independently of Rails (even with the rspec-rails gem).

By convention, when RSpec starts the first thing it does is read command line args from the .rspec in the current directory, if it exists. Then it runs spec_helper.rb (and also rails_helper.rb for rspec-rails 3+). It's actually the spec_helper.rb which does all the heavy-lifting in loading the Rails environment for your tests, along with any of the modules you're using in tests, such as DatabaseCleaner, FactoryGirl, etc.

If you're wondering how RSpec hooks into Rails, the bulk of it is performed in this line, which bootstraps Rails.

require File.expand_path('../../config/environment', __FILE__)

Now, as to your question, without the ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'test' statement, the above line will load Rails in the default environment (development), which isn't what you want, since any gems not in the :test group will not be loaded, and environments/test.rb will not be loaded either.

TL;DR

Test configuration is handled by two files: spec/spec_helper.rb (sometimes named rails_helper.rb) and config/environments/test.rb. The former configures RSpec and any objects and modules which will be used specifically within the files used in spec, the latter configures your Rails app itself. Omitting ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= test loads the development environment and gemsets instead of the test environment and gemsets, which is why you're getting a ton of errors.

Upvotes: 2

Igor Pantović
Igor Pantović

Reputation: 9246

If you are getting uninitialized constant errors for FactoryGirl, DatabaseCleaner etc, you most likely included them to test group in your Gemfile.

You should move them to rspec group, eg:

# Gemfile

group :rspec do
  gem 'factory_girl_rails', '~> 4.0'
  gem 'faker'
end

Upvotes: 1

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