I have literally been bashing my head into the wall this past week trying to figure out how to get RSpec view tests to pass when using Devise. I finally figured it out after a lot of trial and error because there is a particular combination of things you have to have in place to make things work.

First, the what: I added some navigation to a menu bar that only shows up if the user is logged in. It was just:

<nav>
  <% if user_logged_in? %>
    <%= link_to ...blah... %>
  <% end %>
</nav>

The trouble is, I kept getting this error:

Failure/Error: render
ActionView::Template::Error:
  undefined method `authenticate' for nil:NilClass

The first problem was figuring out why Devise’s helpers weren’t being loaded. According to the Devise documentation you should create a spec/support/devise.rb file like:

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.include Devise::TestHelpers, :type => :controller
end

But what about running view tests? The missing line is:

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.include Devise::TestHelpers, :type => :controller
  config.include Devise::TestHelpers, :type => :view
end

Great! But that only solves the missing helpers. What about getting current_user to actually return a user? I tried all sorts of things and spent days searching for the answer and it comes down to stubbing out the helpers … but which object? The answer is on the view itself:

module ApplicationRspecHelpers
  def stub_user
    @user = double('user')
    @user.stub(:id => 100)
    view.stub(:user_signed_in? => true)
    view.stub(:current_user => @user)
  end
end

That works exactly as I want it. So now I can write my view tests like:

require 'spec_helper'

describe 'layouts/application' do
  include ApplicationRspecHelpers

  describe 'authentication nav' do
    context 'when authenticated' do
      it 'should have Log Out' do
        stub_user
        render
        rendered.should have_selector('nav a', text: 'Log Out')
      end
    end
  end
end