Question

I’ve just started using rails, and decided to follow the “Ruby on Rails Tutorial” by M. Hartl. Seems like a good intro.

Am running into a failed test that’s driving me nuts.
I am running rails 3.1.1, with rspec 2.7.0

I have tried modifying the condition, and tests on the “has_password” method work.

The failing test:

1) User password encryption authenticate method should return the user on email/password match
Failure/Error: matching_user.should == @user
 expected: #
      got: nil (using ==)
# ./spec/models/user_spec.rb:149:in `block (4 levels) in '

The rspec test:

describe User do

before(:each) do
@attr = {:name => 'testing', 
         :email =>'[e-mail]',
         :password => "testtest",
         :password_confirmation => "testtest"}
end

...

describe "password encryption" do
  before(:each) do
    @user = User.create!(@attr)
  end

...

describe "authenticate method" do

  it "should exist" do
    User.should respond_to(:authenticate)
  end

  it "should return nil on email/password mismatch" do
    User.authenticate(@attr[:email], "wrongpass").should be_nil
  end

  it "should return nil for an email address with no user" do
    User.authenticate("[e-mail]", @attr[:password]).should be_nil
  end

  it "should return the user on email/password match" do
    matching_user = User.authenticate(@attr[:email], @attr[:password])
    matching_user.should == @user
  end      
end

In the User model:

...

def has_password?(submitted_password) 
  encrypt_password == encrypt(submitted_password)
end

def self.authenticate(email, submitted_password)
  user = find_by_email(email) #self.where("email = ?", email) 
  return nil if user.nil?
  return user if user.has_password?(submitted_password)
end

private

 def encrypt_password
   self.salt = make_salt if new_record?
   self.encrypted_password = encrypt(password)
 end

I cannot figure out what I’m doing wrong here.

Answer 1

In your failing spec you have

matching_user.should == @user

But @user isn’t defined anywhere so it’s set to nil.

Edit:

Try adding the following puts into the failing spec and see what results you get in your spec output after running it.

it "should return the user on email/password match" do
  matching_user = User.authenticate(@attr[:email], @attr[:password])
  puts matching_user  # add this
  puts @user          # and also this
  matching_user.should == @user
end