Living on the Edge

Stubbing Authentication in Your Controllers

Posted on April 06, 2007

I was trying to spec out a few of my controllers that had actions on them requiring authentication. After jumping through many mind hoops to figure out how to stub them out properly I asked the RSpec-Users list and received this solution from Graeme Nelson:

def mock_user_authentication(allow_user_to_pass=true)       
  controller.stub!(:login_required).and_return(allow_user_to_pass)
end

It’s elegantly simple and works well. I’m still fumbling around with this RSpec stuff and did not realize I could stub out a method directly on the controller. This has cleared up a big missing piece in my thinking.

Filed under: Rails Testing | Tagged with: authentication mock rails rspec stub testing  |