Stubbing authentication in request spec

Question

When writing a request spec, how do you set sessions and/or stub controller methods? I'm trying to stub out authentication in my integration tests - rspec/requests

Here's an example of a test

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../spec_helper'
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/authentication_helpers'


describe "Messages" do
  include AuthenticationHelpers

  describe "GET admin/messages" do
    before(:each) do
      @current_user = Factory :super_admin
      login(@current_user)
    end

    it "displays received messages" do
      sender = Factory :jonas
      direct_message = Message.new(:sender_id => sender.id, :subject => "Message system.", :content => "content", :receiver_ids => [@current_user.id])
      direct_message.save
      get admin_messages_path
      response.body.should include(direct_message.subject) 
    end
  end
end

The helper:

module AuthenticationHelpers
  def login(user)
    session[:user_id] = user.id # session is nil
    #controller.stub!(:current_user).and_return(user) # controller is nil
  end
end

And the ApplicationController that handles authentication:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  protect_from_forgery

  helper_method :current_user
  helper_method :logged_in?

  protected

  def current_user  
    @current_user ||= User.find(session[:user_id]) if session[:user_id]  
  end

  def logged_in?
    !current_user.nil?
  end
end

Why is it not possible to access these resources?

1) Messages GET admin/messages displays received messages
     Failure/Error: login(@current_user)
     NoMethodError:
       undefined method `session' for nil:NilClass
     # ./spec/requests/authentication_helpers.rb:3:in `login'
     # ./spec/requests/message_spec.rb:15:in `block (3 levels) in <top (required)>'

Answer 1

A request spec is a thin wrapper around ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest, which doesn't work like controller specs (which wrap ActionController::TestCase). Even though there is a session method available, I don't think it is supported (i.e. it's probably there because a module that gets included for other utilities also includes that method).

I'd recommend logging in by posting to whatever action you use to authenticate users. If you make the password 'password' (for example) for all the User factories, then you can do something like this:

def login(user)
  post login_path, :login => user.login, :password => 'password'
end