Factory Girl

Fixture replacement for focused and readable tests

Remove duplication and confusion from your tests using factories.

factory_girl allows you to quickly define prototypes for each of your models and ask for instances with properties that are important to the test at hand.

Quick links:

Install

gem install thoughtbot-factory_girl --source http://gems.github.com

Note: if you install factory_girl using the gem from Github, you’ll need this in your environment.rb if you want to use Rails 2.1’s dependency manager:

config.gem "thoughtbot-factory_girl", :lib => "factory_girl", :source => "http://gems.github.com"

Define

Add factories to test/factories.rb, spec/factories.rb file, or under a test/factories or spec/factories directory:

Factory.define :user do |f|
  f.first_name 'John'
  f.last_name  'Doe'
end

Factory.define :admin, :parent => :user do |f|
  f.admin true
end

Use

# Saved instance
user = Factory(:user)

# Unsaved instance
user = Factory.build(:user)

# Attribute hash
user_attributes = Factory.attributes_for(:user)

# Stubbed object
user_stub = Factory.stub(:user)

# Override attributes
user = Factory(:user, :first_name => 'Joe')

Be sure to read the documentation

Check us out on github

Credits

Written by Joe Ferris with contributions from the open source community.

Thanks to thoughtbot for ideas, inspiration, and funding.

Copyright and License

Feel free to email us with any questions or feedback.

thoughtbot