Question

The story so far:

I have a rails app with a model named “Term”. All is well until trying to install Cucumber. Upon running

rake cucumber

I get

Term is not a class (TypeError)

This happens because Cucumber includes another gem, ‘term-ansicolor’ (to do the nifty colored text output in the console), and term-ansicolor defines a module named “Term”. Cucumber includes term-ansicolor before including the Rails models, thus “Term” is already defined as a module when loading the “Term” model. Top-level modules and classes cannot have the same names in Ruby, thus the collision.

Preferring not to rename the model, I set about patching the term-ansicolor gem. This proved harder than I thought. I changed the Term module name to “ANSITerm”, but I can’t figure out how to get Cucumber to load my modified gem, which I’ve put into RAILS_ROOT/vendor/gems/term-ansicolor.

Any ideas? Am I barking up the wrong tree?

Answer 1

Two solutions:

1) Change your app’s Term model to be something else.

2) Patch term-ansicolor to have a namespaced Term and use that gem instead.