Testing mailers with RSpec

Unfortunately, RSpec does not provide helpers for testing mailers like TestUnit. But it is easy to add them to your application, and here you could find code snippet for testing mailers.

For the beginning we would define helper for reading fixtures and put them into the spec/mailer_spec_helper.rb file:

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

module MailerSpecHelper
private

def read_fixture(action)
IO.readlines("#{FIXTURES_PATH}/mailers/user_mailer/#{action}")
end
end

Now we need to create fixtures for mailers in the spec/fixtures/mailers folder, each mailer in the separate subfolder like spec/fixtures/mailers/some_mailer/activation:

1	Hello, Bob

In spec/models/mailers/some_mailer_spec.rb we would write something like:

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require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../../mailer_spec_helper.rb'

context 'The SomeMailer mailer' do
FIXTURES_PATH = File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../../fixtures'
CHARSET = 'utf-8'

fixtures :users

include MailerSpecHelper
include ActionMailer::Quoting

setup do
# You don't need these lines while you are using create_ instead of deliver_
#ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :test
#ActionMailer::Base.perform_deliveries = true
#ActionMailer::Base.deliveries = []

@expected = TMail::Mail.new
@expected.set_content_type 'text', 'plain', { 'charset' => CHARSET }
@expected.mime_version = '1.0'
end

specify 'should send activation email' do
@expected.subject = 'Account activation'
@expected.body = read_fixture('activation')
@expected.from = '[email protected]'
@expected.to = users(:bob).email

Mailers::UserMailer.create_activation(users(:bob)).encoded.should == @expected.encoded
end
end

That’s almost all. We are fully confident that emails look as we expected. In controller we don’t need to re-test mailers again, we just need to become convinced of mailer calling!

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context 'Given an signup action of UserController' do
controller_name 'user'

setup do
@user = mock('user')
@valid_user_params = { :email => '[email protected]' }
end

specify 'should deliver activation email to newly created user' do
User.should_receive(:new).with(@valid_user_params).and_return(@user)
Mailers::UserMailer.should_receive(:deliver_activation).with(@user)
post :signup, :user => @valid_user_params
response.should redirect_to(user_activate_url)
end
end

Tadd Giles

said on May 4th, 2008 at 03:08 · Permalink

I’m just learning rspec and despite the now old syntax it was still very helpful. Big thanks!

http://blog.springenwerk.com/

said on October 13th, 2008 at 09:04 · Permalink

Thanks a lot, Dmytro! Very helpful and shot-to-the-point article.

Dallas John Slieker

said on December 23rd, 2008 at 20:29 · Permalink

Thanks for the tutorial. I’d like if you could post another example using mocking and stubbing instead of fixtures.

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