MiniTest Authentication

Question

I'm new to MiniTest. Most of the testing is easy to grasp as it is Ruby code and also has Rspec-style readability. I am, however, having trouble with authentications. As with any app, most controllers are hidden behind some sort of authentication, the most common being authenticate_user to ensure that a user is logged in.

How do I test a session -> user is logged in? I am using authentication from scratch not devise.

I do have this as a reference: https://github.com/chriskottom/minitest_cookbook_source/blob/master/minishop/test/support/session_helpers.rb

But not quite sure how to implement it.

Let's use this as an example controller:

class ProductsController < ApplicationController
  before_action :authenticate_user

  def index
    @products = Product.all
  end

  def show
   @product = Product.find(params[:id])
  end

end

How would my test look in these basic instances?

test "it should GET products index" do
  # insert code to check authenticate_user
  get :index
  assert_response :success
end

test "it should GET products show" do
  # insert code to check authenticate_user
  get :show
  assert_response :success
end

#refactor so logged in only has to be defined once across controllers.

Answer 1

Are you using your custom authentication methods? If so you can pass needed session variables as a third param to request method:

get(:show, {'id' => "12"}, {'user_id' => 5})

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/testing.html#functional-tests-for-your-controllers

Otherwise, if you use any authentication library it usually provides some helper methods for testing.