Setup Factory Girl with Test::Unit and Shoulda

Question

I'm trying to set up Factory Girl with Test::Unit and Shoulda in Ruby on Rails. I have installed the gem, created my factory file under the test/factories directory, and created my spec file under the test/models directory. The current error I'm getting is 'ArgumentError: No such factory: test', which leads me to believe that the test_factory.rb file is not being loaded? Any idea as to what I should change?

Here are my files.

#test/factories/test_factory.rb
Factory.define :test do |t|  
  t.name 'test_spotlight'  
  t.label 'test spotlight label'  
end

and

#test/modes/test_spec.rb
require 'test_helper'
require 'factory_girl'
class TestTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  def setup
    @test = Factory.build(:test)
  end

  context "A test" do
    should "save with the minimum requirements" do
      assert @test.save
    end
  end 
end

Answer 1

Have you tried moving the

require 'factory_girl'

to your *test/test_helper.rb* ?

The factory auto-loading mechanism may depend on where the the require is called. It could be trying to find factories *test/models/factories/** instead of *test/factories/**

Answer 2

Instead of naming your factory file test_factory.rb, try naming it factory.rb

Answer 3

I've run into this problem on one of my projects too. I'm not sure precisely what's causing the initialization code to be skipped but you can force load the factory definitions like this:

require 'factory_girl'
Factory.find_definitions

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

I had the same problem. Eventually I made do by putting all my factories in "/test/factories.rb" and writing the following lines in my "/test/test_helper.rb" file:

require 'factory_girl'
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/factories"

you could do the same thing for multiple files by requiring them in the test_helper. I haven't yet figured out why the auto-include that's mentioned in "factory_girl's" readme doesn't happen.

Answer 5

If I only required 'factory_girl' in test_helper.rb, I would get the same behavior you mentioned, yet if I required it in my config/test/environment.rb (note I use environmentalist) it would properly find the Factory definition without any issue.

I tried this after reading the factory girl rdoc where it says to put config.gem in your environment.

Answer 6

Try putting this in test_helper.rb:

require 'factory_girl'
Dir.glob(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/factories/*").each do |factory|
  require factory
end

Answer 7

I also managed to get rid of this issue by putting this line into my environment.rb:

config.gem "factory_girl", :source => "http://gemcutter.org"

Make also sure you have the latest gem:

Name changed from "thoughtbot-factory_girl" to "factory_girl", source changed from "http://gems.github.com" to "http://gemcutter.org".

Answer 8

Interesting. I had a similar problem trying to get cucumber to work with factory_girl. I had originally configured factory_girl to be looked for ('config.gem') but not loaded in the cucumber environment and fully required in 'features/support/env.rb', same as cucumber does for webrat, etc. That only started to work when I explicitly told factory_girl to find its definitions as Kenny suggested above.

When I removed the require statement from env.rb and fully required factory_girl in the cucumber environment, the effect went away and factory_girl worked out of the box.

So it really seems to be a question of when (or in which context) factory_girl gets loaded.

Answer 9

In case you had this issue with ruby 1.9.2, require expects the expanded path.

File.expand_path("test/factories.rb")

This patch solved my problem. I just sent a pull request. After that you can add this to your test_helper.rb:

require 'factory_girl'
FactoryGirl.find_definitions

Answer 10

I also ran into the problem - after updating FactoryGirl to 1.3.2 - that factories from test/factories were not loaded automatically any more.

I could get rid of the problem by adding the code from dg into test_helper.rb:

Dir.glob(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/factories/*.rb").each do |factory|
 require factory
end

When running single tests in Textmate, everything worked fine, but running e.g. all unit tests from the command line using rake test:units failed with a DuplicateDefinitionError (I read that it has probably something to do with ruby 1.8.x). So I slightly changed the code:

if (!Factory.factories || Factory.factories.empty?)
  Dir.glob(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/factories/*.rb").each do |factory|
    require factory
  end
end