Rails: Communicating between RSpec helper modules

0
votes

I would be very grateful for some advice on the following.

Below I have a simplified example for our setup.

I have defined some Helper modules on our RSpec test suite:

## spec/rails_helper.rb

Dir[Rails.root.join("spec/support/**/*.rb")].each { |f| require f }

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.include ViewHelpers
end



### spec/support/view_helpers/base.rb

# frozen_string_literal: true

module ViewHelpers
  class Base
    # class content
  end
end



### spec/support/view_helpers/admins/payments/new.rb

# frozen_string_literal: true

module ViewHelpers
  module Admins
    module Payments
      class New < Base
        # class content
      end
    end
  end
end

With this setup the specs run perfectly locally; the sub-class New inherits from Base as expected. However, when the tests are running on Travis CI, we get the following error:

NameError:
1433  uninitialized constant ViewHelpers::Admins::Payments::Base
1434# ./spec/support/view_helpers/admins/payments/new.rb:6:in `<module:Payments>'
1435# ./spec/support/view_helpers/admins/payments/new.rb:5:in `<module:Admins>'
1436# ./spec/support/view_helpers/admins/payments/new.rb:4:in `<module:ViewHelpers>'
1437# ./spec/support/view_helpers/admins/payments/new.rb:3:in `<top (required)>'
1438# ./spec/rails_helper.rb:34:in `block in <top (required)>'
1439# ./spec/rails_helper.rb:34:in `each'
1440# ./spec/rails_helper.rb:34:in `<top (required)>'
1441# ./spec/controllers/admins/billpayers_controller_spec.rb:3:in `<top (required)>'

I have also tried inheriting with explicit namespacing:

# frozen_string_literal: true

module ViewHelpers
  module Admins
    module Payments
      class New < ViewHelpers::Base
        # class content
      end
    end
  end
end

Again, this runs successfully locally but Travis CI errors:

NameError:
1433  uninitialized constant ViewHelpers::Base
1434# ./spec/support/view_helpers/admins/payments/new.rb:6:in `<module:Payments>'
1435# ./spec/support/view_helpers/admins/payments/new.rb:5:in `<module:Admins>'
1436# ./spec/support/view_helpers/admins/payments/new.rb:4:in `<module:ViewHelpers>'
1437# ./spec/support/view_helpers/admins/payments/new.rb:3:in `<top (required)>'
1438# ./spec/rails_helper.rb:34:in `block in <top (required)>'
1439# ./spec/rails_helper.rb:34:in `each'
1440# ./spec/rails_helper.rb:34:in `<top (required)>'
1441# ./spec/controllers/admins/billpayers_controller_spec.rb:3:in `<top (required)>'

I am rather stumped as to why this works locally but not on CI. Would be very grateful for any support and insight.

Thanks Sam

2
ruby-on-railsrubyinheritancerspectravis-ci

2 Answers

0
votes

Hi did you double checked your autoload configurations? (https://guides.rubyonrails.org/autoloading_and_reloading_constants.html)

Autoload and cache classes may be configured differently based on your environment configs:

├── config/environments
    ├── development.rb
    ├── production.rb
    └── test.rb
0
votes

It turns out the ordering of

Dir[Rails.root.join("spec/support/**/*.rb")]

depends on the OS and filesystem.

This means the sub-classes were getting required before the super-class.

Solution:

Dir[Rails.root.join("spec/support/**/*.rb")].sort