Failing to test Devise with Capybara

Question

I'm building a Rails 3 app using Devise, with Capybara for UI testing. The following test is failing:

class AuthenticationTest < ActionController::IntegrationTest

  def setup
    @user = User.create!(:email => '[email protected]', 
                         :password => 'testtest', 
                         :password_confirmation => 'testtest')
    @user.save!
    Capybara.reset_sessions!
  end

  test "sign_in" do
    # this proves the user exists in the database ...
    assert_equal 1, User.count
    assert_equal '[email protected]', User.first.email

    # ... but we still can't log in ...
    visit '/users/sign_in'
    assert page.has_content?('Sign in')
    fill_in :user_email, :with => '[email protected]'
    fill_in :user_password, :with => 'testtest'
    click_button('user_submit')

    # ... because this test fails
    assert page.has_content?('Signed in successfully.')
  end

end

... but I have no idea why. As you can see from the code, the user is being created in the database; I'm using the same approach to create the user as I did in seeds.rb.

If I run the test through the debugger, I can see the user in the database and verify that the page is loading. But still the authentication fails; I can verify this because if I change the assertion to test for the failure case, the test passes:

# verify that the authentication actually failed
assert page.has_content?('Invalid email or password.')

I'm used to Rails 2, & using Selenium for this sort of testing, so I suspect I'm doing something daft. Could someone please point me in the right direction here?

Answer 1

I was having the same issue and found a thread with a solution:

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.use_transactional_fixtures = false

  config.before(:suite) do
    DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
  end

  config.before(:each) do
    DatabaseCleaner.start
  end

  config.after(:each) do
    DatabaseCleaner.clean
  end

end

For the DatabaseCleaner stuff to work you'll need to include the database_cleaner gem. If you haven't used it before, you may need to rake db:test:prepare before rerunning your tests. I hope this works for you, too!

Answer 2

I've run into a similar problem before. Setting the password directly has some weird effects because it's supposed to be encrypted and stored with a salt--sometimes it works for me and other times it doesn't. I have a hard time remembering which specific cases were problematic. I'd recommend the following, in this order (for simplicity)

• Verify that the password field is getting filled in properly and passed as the right param (not necessary if you're using Devise's autogenerated view and haven't touched it)
  • if your site can run in development mode (i.e. no log in bugs), then just boot it up and log in manually
  • If not, insert debugger as the first line in your sessions_controller. Then check params and make sure the password is correct and in params[:user][:password].
    
    If you didn't override Devise's sessions_controller, then you can find your Devise path with bundle show devise. Then look for the create action within (devise path)/app/controllers/devise/sessions_controller.rb
• Change your test setup to create a user through the web interface, to ensure the password gets set properly, then try running your test again

Answer 3

I had the same issue with a setup fairly similar to yours. In my case, switching to ActiveRecord sessions in the initializer solved the problem.

Additionally, make sure you call @user.skip_confirmation! if you are using the "confirmable" module in devise.