Factory Bot is now 3.0! It’s been a wonderful eight months and I’m really excited about what we’ve added in 2.x. We’ve adopted semantic versioning and it’s been a good way to ensure that we’re providing software that’s reliable and stable.
The Big Changes
No more Ruby 1.8 support
You heard correctly; FactoryBot requires Ruby 1.9+. We want to continue to
move forward and supporting 1.8 was something we felt was holding us back.
Ruby 1.9 introduces awesomeness like BasicObject, something we had to
backport to 1.8 with ActiveSupport — no more!
If you can’t upgrade to Ruby 1.9 and Rails 3, you can continue to use
factory_bot_rails version 1.x and FactoryBot 2.x; those will continue to
support Ruby 1.8.7+ and Rails 2.3.9+.
No more Rails 2 support
FactoryBot 3.0 now only supports Rails 3.x. This will allow us to move forward without having to worry about outdated versions of gems like ActiveSupport.
Vintage syntax deprecated
The vintage syntax has been deprecated and will be removed in the next major release. For those who don’t know what the vintage syntax is, it follows any of these forms:
Factory(:comment)
Factory.next(:email)
Factory.stub(:article)
Factory.define(:admin_user, :parent => :user) do |admin|
admin.admin true
end
The alternates for each of these would be (after configuring FactoryBot to play nicely with RSpec, Test::Unit, or Cucumber):
create(:comment)
generate(:email)
build_stubbed(:article)
factory :admin, parent: :user do
admin true
end
We chose to do this because the new syntax is awesome and more concise. Plus,
repeating Factory.define thirty or forty times in a single file is gross.
Upgrading
To upgrade in a Rails app, just update your Gemfile:
group :test do
gem "factory_bot_rails", "~> 3.0"
end
If you’re not running Rails:
gem "factory_bot", "~> 3.0"
What’s next
Factory Bot 2.x introduced a cleaner syntax, traits, ignored attributes, creating multiple records at a time, custom constructors, and more. There are some awesome ideas floating around for 3.x, including separating associations from foreign keys, cleaning up how custom constructors work, ways to define both custom callbacks and custom strategies, and more. Keep your eyes peeled as we move forward!
Disclaimer:
Looking for FactoryGirl? The library was renamed in 2017. Project name history can be found here.
