config.cache_classes = false messing up rspec tests?

Question

I\'m following the Ruby on Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl (railstutorial.org).

At some point I got tired of tests failing just bescause the tests used old cached v

Answer 1

When you make a Capybara call, it uses rack-test to emulate a call to the rails app. Every time a call is completed, it reloads all rails classes. What this means is that the @user object you created before you called 'visit signin_path' gets nil'd out because all ActiveRecord objects have been reloaded.

When you set cache-classes to true, it tells Rack not to reload the ActiveRecord objects on every request, so your tests pass again.

I believe that if you want the test you wrote above to pass without turning on cache-classes, you should move the '@user = Factory(:user)' line below the 'visit signin_path' line.

Answer 2

I had exactly the same problem and like you setting config.cache_classes to true solved the problem. But caching classes in the test environment really isn't what you want I don't think. I certainly don't understand why caching classes makes the tests pass.

So the way I found to solve this was to install a database cleane as the reason the tests are failing is due to duplicate entries in the test database. https://github.com/bmabey/database_cleaner

Then in your gemfile, in your test group add this.

gem 'database_cleaner', '0.6.6'

then run "bundle install" to install this gem

Then... in your spec_helper.rb file, add this..

RSpec.configure do |config|
.
.
.
.
   config.before(:each) do
      DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
      DatabaseCleaner.clean
   end

This will clear your test database before each run of your rspec tests.

Hope this helps. Cheers, mark.