What's the best way to unit test protected & private methods in Ruby?

Question

You can bypass encapsulation with the send method:

myobject.send(:method_name, args)

This is a 'feature' of Ruby. :)

There was internal debate during Ruby 1.9 development which considered having send respect privacy and send! ignore it, but in the end nothing changed in Ruby 1.9. Ignore the comments below discussing send! and breaking things.

Here's one easy way if you use RSpec:

before(:each) do
  MyClass.send(:public, *MyClass.protected_instance_methods)  
end

Just reopen the class in your test file, and redefine the method or methods as public. You don't have to redefine the guts of the method itself, just pass the symbol into the public call.

If you original class is defined like this:

class MyClass

  private

  def foo
    true
  end
end

In you test file, just do something like this:

class MyClass
  public :foo

end

You can pass multiple symbols to public if you want to expose more private methods.

public :foo, :bar

instance_eval() might help:

--------------------------------------------------- Object#instance_eval
     obj.instance_eval(string [, filename [, lineno]] )   => obj
     obj.instance_eval {| | block }                       => obj
------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Evaluates a string containing Ruby source code, or the given 
     block, within the context of the receiver (obj). In order to set 
     the context, the variable self is set to obj while the code is 
     executing, giving the code access to obj's instance variables. In 
     the version of instance_eval that takes a String, the optional 
     second and third parameters supply a filename and starting line 
     number that are used when reporting compilation errors.

        class Klass
          def initialize
            @secret = 99
          end
        end
        k = Klass.new
        k.instance_eval { @secret }   #=> 99

You can use it to access private methods and instance variables directly.

You could also consider using send(), which will also give you access to private and protected methods (like James Baker suggested)

Alternatively, you could modify the metaclass of your test object to make the private/protected methods public just for that object.

    test_obj.a_private_method(...) #=> raises NoMethodError
    test_obj.a_protected_method(...) #=> raises NoMethodError
    class << test_obj
        public :a_private_method, :a_protected_method
    end
    test_obj.a_private_method(...) # executes
    test_obj.a_protected_method(...) # executes

    other_test_obj = test.obj.class.new
    other_test_obj.a_private_method(...) #=> raises NoMethodError
    other_test_obj.a_protected_method(...) #=> raises NoMethodError

This will let you call these methods without affecting other objects of that class. You could reopen the class within your test directory and make them public for all the instances within your test code, but that might affect your test of the public interface.

One way I've done it in the past is:

class foo
  def public_method
    private_method
  end

private unless 'test' == Rails.env

  def private_method
    'private'
  end
end

I'm sure somebody will pipe up and dogmatically assert that "you should only unit test public methods; if it needs unit testing, it shouldn't be a protected or private method", but I'm not really interested in debating that.

You could also refactor those into a new object in which those methods are public, and delegate to them privately in the original class. This will allow you to test the methods without magic metaruby in your specs while yet keeping them private.

I've got several methods that are protected or private for good and valid reasons

What are those valid reasons? Other OOP languages can get away without private methods at all (smalltalk comes to mind - where private methods only exist as a convention).

Similar to @WillSargent's response, here's what I've used in a describe block for the special case of testing some protected validators without needing to go through the heavyweight process of creating/updating them with FactoryGirl (and you could use private_instance_methods similarly):

  describe "protected custom `validates` methods" do
    # Test these methods directly to avoid needing FactoryGirl.create
    # to trigger before_create, etc.
    before(:all) do
      @protected_methods = MyClass.protected_instance_methods
      MyClass.send(:public, *@protected_methods)
    end
    after(:all) do
      MyClass.send(:protected, *@protected_methods)
      @protected_methods = nil
    end

    # ...do some tests...
  end