How to test a Rails3 Engine with Devise and rspec

Question

I am developing a Rails engine that depends on the Devise Gem. My Engine itself is a gem too and i need to write tests for that thing. For this i did lots of readings of how to test an engine from inside of a gem and i came to the following setup:

my_engine
 +- app    # my engine stuff
 +- config # my engine stuff
 +- Gemfile
 +- lib    # my engine stuff
 +- public # my engine stuff
 +- spec
     +- controllers    # controller tests
     +- models         # model tests
     +- dummy          # a dummy application that is using the 'my_engine/Gemfile' 
     +- spec_helper.rb # the spec helper that boots the dummy app

Before i included the Devise gem, i could write tests and run them with

rake spec

Now i have the Devise gem and a user model like this

class Manager::User < ActiveRecord::Base
    devise :database_authenticatable, :registerable, # ...
end

and my tests fail pointing to the user class and the devise call.

`method_missing': undefined method `devise'

So now i try to investigate the error and find out how to boot up the dummy application with devise and my engine together. The spec helper looks like this

# my_engine/spec/spec_helper.rb#
ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= 'test'
require File.expand_path("../dummy/config/environment.rb",  __FILE__) # boots the dummy app and fails
# more rspec stuff gies here

The evnironment.rb

# my_engine/spec/dummy/config/environment.rb
# Load the rails application
require File.expand_path('../application', __FILE__)

# Initialize the rails application
Dummy::Application.initialize!

The application.rb

# my_engine/spec/dummy/config/application.rb
require File.expand_path('../boot', __FILE__)
require 'rails/all'
Bundler.require(:default, Rails.env) if defined?(Bundler)
# Dummy::Application definition follows here (the common stuff)

The boot.rb

# my_engine/spec/dummy/config/boot.rb
require 'rubygems'
# Loads the gemfile from 'my_engine/Gemfile'
gemfile = File.expand_path('../../../../Gemfile', __FILE__)

begin
  ENV['BUNDLE_GEMFILE'] = gemfile
  require 'bundler'
  Bundler.setup
rescue Bundler::GemNotFound => e
  STDERR.puts e.message
  STDERR.puts "Try running `bundle install`."
  exit!
end if File.exist?(gemfile)

The gemfile

# my_engine/Gemfile
source :gemcutter

gem 'rails', '3.0.3'
gem 'rake'

gem 'devise', '>=1.2.rc'
gem 'declarative_authorization', '0.5.2'

group :test do
  gem "cucumber"
  gem "cucumber-rails"
  gem "database_cleaner"
  gem "capybara", ">= 0.4.0"
  gem "capybara-envjs"
  gem "culerity"
  gem "webrat"
  gem "rspec-rails", ">= 2.4.0"
  gem "jeweler"
end

I tried also to require my engine like this

gem "my_engine", :path => "./"

The Gemfile and the gems are all loaded (Bundler.setup runs through and Devise constant is available).
Now i created an external application that uses my_engine gem. When i copy the tests from my engine and run them, then they all pass.

Is there anything I am missing? Maybe there is a better way to write tests for an engine?

Answer 1

What a beastly shame, i forgot to add the devise initializer into the dummy app. Somehow i thought about that for my external app. With the initializer it all works perfectly.