rspec error undefined local variable or method 'user' michael hartl tutorial

Question

I've been working on Michael Hartl's Rails tutorial app to basically make a replica of twitter. I'm running into a problem in my test suite. One difference between my code and Hartl's code is that I didn't feel like installing FactoryGirl to generate test users, so I create a user at the beginning of the test. I feel like this may be part of the issue but would like to understand what exactly is wrong. My test script below (I'm getting the error at the line: fill_in "Email", with: user.email):

describe "Authentication" do 
subject {page}
before do
    @user = User.create(name: "Example User", email: "[email protected]", 
          password: "foobar", password_confirmation: "foobar")
end

describe "signin page" do
    before { visit signin_path }

    describe "with invalid information" do
        before { click_button "Sign in"}

        it { should have_selector('title', text: 'Sign in')}
        it { should have_selector('div.alert.alert-error', text: 'Invalid')}

    end



    describe "with valid information" do
        let(:user) { User.find_by_email(@user.email) }

        fill_in "Email", with: user.email
        fill_in "Password", with: user.password
        click_button "Sign in"
    end

    it { should have_selector('title', text: user.name) }
    it { should have_link('Profile', href: user_path(user)) }
    it { should have_link('Sign out', href: signout_path) }
    it { should_not have_link('Sign in', href: signin_path) }
    it { should have_link('Sign out')}


    describe "after visiting another page" do
        before { click_link "Home" }
        it { should_not have_selector('div.alert.alert-error') }
    end
end

end

UPDATE: Managed to resolve on my own - I ended up resolving by creating the user instance within the describe with valid information block like so, then referring directly to the instance I created instead of using the let(:user) method.

'describe "with valid information" do before do @user = User.create(name: "Example User", email: "[email protected]", password: "foobar", password_confirmation: "foobar")

        fill_in "Email", with: @user.email
        fill_in "Password", with: @user.password
        click_button "Sign in"
    end


    it { should have_selector('title', text: @user.name) }
    it { should have_link('Profile', href: user_path(@user)) }
    it { should have_link('Sign out', href: signout_path) }
    it { should_not have_link('Sign in', href: signin_path) }
    it { should have_link('Sign out')}
end'

Tomek Wałkuski Tomek Wałkuski · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-29T08:49:20

I think what you should do is just:

describe "Authentication" do 
  subject { page }

  let!(:user) do
    User.create(name: "Example User", email: "[email protected]", 
      password: "foobar", password_confirmation: "foobar")
  end

  describe "signin page" do
    before { visit signin_path }

    describe "with invalid information" do
      before { click_button "Sign in"}

      it { should have_selector('title', text: 'Sign in')}
      it { should have_selector('div.alert.alert-error', text: 'Invalid')}
    end

    describe "with valid information" do
      fill_in "Email", with: user.email
      fill_in "Password", with: user.password
      click_button "Sign in"
    end

    it { should have_selector('title', text: user.name) }
    it { should have_link('Profile', href: user_path(user)) }
    it { should have_link('Sign out', href: signout_path) }
    it { should_not have_link('Sign in', href: signin_path) }
    it { should have_link('Sign out')}

    describe "after visiting another page" do
      before { click_link "Home" }

      it { should_not have_selector('div.alert.alert-error') }
    end
  end
end

What let! does it instantiates the user accessor, puts into before block and reset after every example.

rspec error undefined local variable or method 'user' michael hartl tutorial

2 Answers