RSpec shared examples must not be shared

Question

This took me by surprise…

Seems that you can’t use the same name for 2 rspec shared example groups anywhere within your project. If you do, then when you run rake spec (to run all the specs), then rspec complains that a shared example group was declared with a non-unique name.

This happens even when the calls to shared_examples_for are contained within a describe block (one would presume that should scope the examples).

At first I tried to work around this by changing the names of the example groups (not ideal, but I can live with it).

But this became more of a problem when I wanted to factor out the example group to a separate file so I could share it between multiple spec files.

The specs work okay when run in isolation, but when I run the suite, rspec complains.

`ensure_shared_example_group_name_not_taken': \
Shared example group 'a person' already exists (ArgumentError)

Surely this is a common problem.

Is there something I’m missing here?

Answer 1

As of rspec 2.6, shared examples are global. You can declare them in an example group, but they are not scoped to that group.