Factory Girl Devise user factory is not valid - doesn't pass RSpec test

Question

I'm new to programming and have been learning Ruby on Rails for about 11 weeks.

When trying to test my user factory for validation, I get

  1) User has a valid factory
     Failure/Error: expect(@user.valid?).to eq(true)

       expected: true
            got: false

       (compared using ==)

I'm using Devise for my user model, and FactoryGirl for my factories.

Here is my user factory:

FactoryGirl.define do 
  factory :user do
    name "John Fahey"
    sequence(:email, 100) { |n| "person#{n}@example.com" }
    password "password"
    password_confirmation "password"
    confirmed_at Time.now
  end
end

...and here is my spec

require 'rails_helper'

  describe User do 
    before do
      @user = build(:user)
    end

  it "has a valid factory" do
   expect(@user.valid?).to eq(true)
   end 
end

I've been working on getting this spec to pass for a while now. For a while I was getting the "email already taken" error and I've gotten past that. I even got the spec to pass once, but I was using the now deprecated "should be" syntax. When I go to the correct ":expect" syntax I get this error. Does anyone have an idea of what I'm doing wrong here?

Here is my model

class User < ActiveRecord::Base

  #== schema information. 
  # create_table "users", force: true do |t|
  #   t.string   "name"
  #   t.string   "email",                  default: "", null: false
  #   t.string   "encrypted_password",     default: "", null: false
  #   t.string   "reset_password_token"
  #   t.datetime "reset_password_sent_at"
  #   t.datetime "remember_created_at"
  #   t.integer  "sign_in_count",          default: 0,  null: false
  #   t.datetime "current_sign_in_at"
  #   t.datetime "last_sign_in_at"
  #   t.string   "current_sign_in_ip"
  #   t.string   "last_sign_in_ip"
  #   t.string   "confirmation_token"
  #   t.datetime "confirmed_at"
  #   t.datetime "confirmation_sent_at"
  #   t.string   "unconfirmed_email"
  #   t.datetime "created_at"
  #   t.datetime "updated_at"
  # end

  # add_index "users", ["email"], name: "index_users_on_email", unique: true
  # add_index "users", ["reset_password_token"], name: "index_users_on_reset_password_token", unique: true


  has_one :list
  has_many :items, through: :list
  devise :database_authenticatable, :registerable,
         :recoverable, :rememberable, :trackable, :validatable, :confirmable
end

here is what I see when I create a user instance in the rails console and test for errors:

2.0.0-p576 :004 > @user = User.create
   (0.2ms)  begin transaction
   (0.2ms)  rollback transaction
 => #<User id: nil, name: nil, email: "", encrypted_password: "", reset_password_token: nil, reset_password_sent_at: nil, remember_created_at: nil, sign_in_coun
t: 0, current_sign_in_at: nil, last_sign_in_at: nil, current_sign_in_ip: nil, last_sign_in_ip: nil, confirmation_token: nil, confirmed_at: nil, confirmation_sen
t_at: nil, unconfirmed_email: nil, created_at: nil, updated_at: nil>
2.0.0-p576 :005 > @user.save
   (1.0ms)  begin transaction
   (0.1ms)  rollback transaction
 => false
2.0.0-p576 :006 > puts(@user.errors)
#<ActiveModel::Errors:0xa7cff88>
 => nil
2.0.0-p576 :007 >

When i print the error messages, I get

2.0.0-p576 :007 > puts(@user.errors.messages)
{:email=>["can't be blank"], :password=>["can't be blank"]}
 => nil

here's something interesting. Just to make sure, I did a rake db:migrate, and a rake db:test:prepare. The test passed. Then I did the exact test again, and it failed.

vagrant@rails-dev-box:~/code/blocitoff$ rake db:migrate
vagrant@rails-dev-box:~/code/blocitoff$ rake db:migrate
vagrant@rails-dev-box:~/code/blocitoff$ rake db:test:prepare
vagrant@rails-dev-box:~/code/blocitoff$ rspec spec/models/user_spec.rb
#<ActiveModel::Errors:0xbdf0740>
.

Finished in 0.1764 seconds (files took 8.96 seconds to load)
1 example, 0 failures
vagrant@rails-dev-box:~/code/blocitoff$ rspec spec/models/user_spec.rb
#<ActiveModel::Errors:0xa97066c>
F

Failures:

  1) User has a valid factory
     Failure/Error: expect(@user.valid?).to eq(true)

       expected: true
            got: false

       (compared using ==)

Answer 1

Your email attribute needs to be unique and you're not cleaning your database between tests, so you're getting on error on second and subsequent executions of your test. See https://relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-rails/docs/transactions to learn about use of transactions in RSpec.

Answer 2

Just to package what Peter said, I was able to solve my problem by adding this setting to my spec_helper.rb.

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.use_transactional_fixtures = true
end