Testing Sessions in Rails 3 with Rspec & Capybara

Question

I'm trying to write integration tests with rspec, factory_girl & capybara. I also have cucumber installed, but I'm not using it (to my knowledge).

I basically want to prepopulate the db with my user, then go to my home page and try to log in. It should redirect to user_path(@user).

However, sessions don't seem to be persisted in my /rspec/requests/ integration tests.

My spec: /rspec/requests/users_spec.rb

require 'spec_helper'

describe "User flow" do

  before(:each) do
    @user = Factory(:user)
  end

  it "should login user" do

    visit("/index")

    fill_in :email, :with => @user.email
    fill_in :password, :with => @user.password
    click_button "Login"
    assert current_path == user_path(@user)
  end
end

Returns:

Failures:

  1) User flow should login user
     Failure/Error: assert current_path == user_path(@user)
     <false> is not true.
     # (eval):2:in `send'
     # (eval):2:in `assert'
     # ./spec/requests/users_spec.rb:16

Instead, it redirects to my please_login_path - which should happen if the login fails for any reason (or if session[:user_id] is not set).

If I try to put session.inspect, it fails as a nil object.

If I try to do this in the controller tests (/rspec/controllers/sessions_spec.rb), I can access the session with no problem, and I can call session[:user_id]

Answer 1

If you are using Devise, you'll need to include Warden::Test::Helpers (right after the require of spec_helper is a good place) as outlined in the warden wiki.

The call to session is returning nil because capybara doesn't provide access to it when running as an integration test.

Answer 2

I have the same problems and although filling out a form might be an option for some, I had to roll my own authentication ruby because I was using a third party auth system (Janrain to be exact).... in my tests I ended up using something like this:

Here is what I have in my spec/support/test_helpers_and_stuff.rb

module AuthTestHelper

  class SessionBackdoorController < ::ApplicationController
    def create
      sign_in User.find(params[:user_id])
      head :ok
    end
  end

  begin
    _routes = Rails.application.routes
    _routes.disable_clear_and_finalize = true
    _routes.clear!
    Rails.application.routes_reloader.paths.each{ |path| load(path) }
    _routes.draw do
      # here you can add any route you want
      match "/test_login_backdoor", to: "session_backdoor#create"
    end
    ActiveSupport.on_load(:action_controller) { _routes.finalize! }
  ensure
    _routes.disable_clear_and_finalize = false
  end

  def request_signin_as(user)
    visit "/test_login_backdoor?user_id=#{user.id}"
  end

  def signin_as(user)
    session[:session_user] = user.id
  end

end

Then in my request spec, with capybara and selenium, I did the following:

describe "Giveaway Promotion" do
  context "Story: A fan participates in a giveaway", js: :selenium do
    context "as a signed in user" do

      before :each do
        @user = Factory(:user)
        request_signin_as @user
      end

      it "should be able to participate as an already signed in user" do
        visit giveaway_path
        ....
      end
    end
  end
end

BTW, I came up with solutions after trying the proposed solutions to this post and this post and neither of them worked for me. (but they certainly inspired my solution)

Good luck!