Question

I am trying to build a test suite using Rspec and I have always a “Stack Level too deep” failure message, whatever the test that I try to run.

I am using Rails 3.0.5 and Rspec 2.0.1

To make it very simple, I just made a simple test:

it "should show home page" do
  visit root_path
  response.should be_success
end

Testing ONLY this test file using:

rspec ./spec/requests/simple_test.rb

gives me the “Stack level too deep” error.

The root path is for now just a simple home page that says “this is the home page” and it works fine in a browser. Moreover, the test.log file shows that the request has been processed and gave a 200 OK answer … still the test fails “visit root_path: stack level too deep…

Anyone knows what is happening? I have searched the web and found many answers for which there was an infinite recursion but here ??? …

A last precision: a few months ago, I did not have this problem .. since then, I installed devise (version 1.5.3) … but here, I do not make any call to neither devise, nor user controllers, so what could cause this behaviour ?

Many thanks in advance for any clue… I don’t know how to tackle or debug this.

Answer 1

The problem is a bug in webrat:

Webrat 0.7.3 or 0.7.2 causes “Stack level too deep” error when used with Rspec 2.0.1.

Downgrading to webrat 0.7.1 fixed the issue

More explanations there: http://www.backdrifter.com/2010/11/07/stack-level-too-deep-with-rspec-2-and-webrat/