Question

I’m using Devise (v2.1.2) with Omniauth for user verification. I’m working on a functional test for a controller that takes a JSON object as the POST body and thus using the technique from this question to set the raw POST body. This works fine for development, but when I run tests I get an exception on a method that’s completely unauthenticated:

NoMethodError: undefined method `user' for nil:NilClass

Example test:

test "should be able to create an item" do    
  m = FactoryGirl.attributes_for(:item)
  raw_post :create, {}, m.to_json 
  assert_response :success   
end

None of my models have a user method, and nothing in this controller uses authentication, so I was pretty confused. A full stack trace shows that the error comes from the first line of this function in Devise:

def sign_out_all_scopes(lock=true)
  users = Devise.mappings.keys.map { |s| warden.user(:scope => s, :run_callbacks => false) }

  warden.raw_session.inspect
  warden.logout
  expire_devise_cached_variables!
  warden.clear_strategies_cache!
  warden.lock! if lock

  users.any?
end

So it looks like in my functional tests (and only in my functional tests) the warden object is nil.

1. Why is this function being called on an unauthenticated request?
2. Why doesn’t the warden object exist here?
3. What can I do to fix it?

Answer 1

1. No idea, Devise is doing its own thing.
2. See 1.
3. Include Devise::TestHelpers.

The Devise documentation says that you need to include the helpers in order to use them. It does not say that if you don’t include the helpers your functional tests will fail, including those that don’t use any authentication, but that’s what happens.

(Note the JSON handling here, which I originally thought was the problem, ended up being just a red herring. Even with standard post or get you will have this problem.)