How to use Alchemy factories in my app specs?

[phantomwhale]

Having upgraded to Alchemy 5.2, I'm now getting the deprecation message to tell me to stop calling:

require "alchemy/test_support/factories"

Which I'm doing at the top of my config/environments/test.rb file, and instead use the code block:

# spec/rails_helper.rb

require 'alchemy/test_support'

FactoryBot.definition_file_paths.append(Alchemy::TestSupport.factories_path)
FactoryBot.find_definitions

Only problem is ... where exactly to put that block?

The top of my rails_helper.rb looks like:

require 'spec_helper'
ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= 'test'
require_relative '../config/environment'

abort("The Rails environment is running in production mode!") if Rails.env.production?
require 'rspec/rails'
# Add additional requires below this line. Rails is not loaded until this point!

If I put it after line 3, it's too late - on line 3, the app files get loaded, and any specs using an Alchemy factory complains about unregistered factories.

If I put i ABOVE line 3, it's too early - FactoryBot and Alchemy haven't yet been loaded; and trying to throw some require statements infront of it just gets messy.

I also tried following https://github.com/thoughtbot/factory_bot_rails/blob/main/README.md#automatic-factory-definition-loading and adding config.factory_bot.definition_file_paths += "lib/alchemy/test_support/factories" to my test environment config file, but then my own apps factories stopped loading as well

At this point, after a few hours of trying, I went back to the deprecated approach. But next week, we're trying to get up to Alchemy 6, so ideally I can figure out how to do this "correctly" by then, but I'm very puzzled the the deprecation warning doesn't seem to be supplying working code

(and yes, I've seen it changes slightly on the Alchemy 6 branch, but the overall suggestion looks to be the same)

[tvdeyen]

Maybe this helps? https://github.com/AlchemyCMS/alchemy-solidus/blob/main/spec/rails_helper.rb

[phantomwhale]

Looks like factory_bot_rails was the problem - it loads the factory definitions when require_relative '../config/environment' executes, which causes the chicken and egg problem for our app.

This problem might not apply to other rails apps, as I also uncovered that we have the following in OUR factory definitions:

FactoryBot.modify do
  factory :alchemy_content do
    trait :essence_link do
      essence_type { "Alchemy::EssenceLink" }
      association :essence, factory: :alchemy_essence_link
    end
  end
end

Meaning we need the alchemy factory definitions loaded before we load ours. Going back to just factory_bot gem, and adding in the recommend lines ALMOST works; due to us modifying Alchemy factories, we end up needing to prepend the definitions instead:

require "alchemy/test_support"
FactoryBot.definition_file_paths.prepend(Alchemy::TestSupport.factories_path)
FactoryBot.find_definitions

And looks like it works nicely now!

[tvdeyen]

Nice find! Glad that it worked