The Refinery CMS is apparently the most used chunk of CMS code in the rails ecosystem. Version 1.0 came out recently, and one of the recent changes involved the authentication system. Previously, Refinery had bundled authlogic; now it’s using Devise.

If you’re not doing anything worth testing on the admin side, the authlogic / Devise switch doesn’t make a difference. Still, there is one snag to overcome even in functional tests of your public code: a Refinery installation will direct all requests to a screen for creating the initial user, until said superuser is created. This applies as much to your empty test database as to a newly created Refinery site.

Public-facing URLs

An admin user needs to exist, but doesn’t have to be logged in. The default admin has roles ‘Refinery’ and ‘Superuser’, so I create such a user via factory_girl ¹:

Then within functional classes, we simply need to create that user:

def setup
  admin = Factory.create(:user)
end

Admin URLs

If you want to check admin-side code in functional tests, the admin user needs to be logged in. I had a solution under the old setup, but had to make a few changes after the move to Devise. Here’s what’s working now:

1: well, factory_girl_rails is needed for rails 3, and it includes factory_girl. The stable version of factory_girl, which has a different syntax than the master code you’d see at the factory_girl github page. Confusing!