Goldberg is a great plugin for user/role authentication, with simplistic CMS features and an administrative interface. It wraps itself around your application without adding a single line of code to it.

The Dark Con

But for a plugin that makes authentication so easy, testing really sucks. To boot, a goldberg-enabled application is currently very unintuitive to deploy (more on that in a separate post).

Once goldberg is installed, your functional/integration tests will fail because goldberg intercepts all url requests and redirects you to /goldberg/auth/login. Fret not, here’s what to do.

Loading Goldberg’s data into the test environment

Goldberg provides two handy rake tasks:

• rake goldberg:dump_bootstrap which dumps your goldberg specific data to yaml files under vendor/plugins/goldberg/db/
• rake goldberg:load_bootstrap loads the data, from the yaml files that dump_bootstrap created, into your current database environment.

Dig into the second task and you’ll see that it uses a GoldbergMigration.load_bootstrap method.

Add this to both your functional and integration tests:

def setup
  GoldbergMigration.load_bootstrap
end

This loads the goldberg-specific data into your test environment. (of course, you need to dump it at least once using rake goldberg:dump_bootstrap !)

Integration Tests

In your integration tests, add the above code to your setup method, and use the below code in your test methods.

def test_index
 
    get "/goldberg/auth/login"
    assert_response :success
    post "/goldberg/auth/login", :login => {:name => "yourusername", :password => "yourpass"}
    follow_redirect!
    assert_response :success
 
    # do your testing here
    get "yourcontroller/index"
    assert_response :success
    assert_template "yourcontroller/index"
end

Functional Tests

Put the following into your setup method and they’ll run fine.

def setup
    get 'goldberg/auth/login' # otherwise @request.session will be empty
    @ouruser = Goldberg::User.find(:first, :conditions => 'name="yourusername"')
    Goldberg::AuthController.set_user(@request.session, @ouruser.id)
end

The downside to this is that calling GoldbergMigration.load_bootstrap for every test method slows down your tests, as it reads the .yml files from disk everytime. Awful, I know. But I can’t find a better way.

Don’t forget

Before you run your tests, don’t forget to create the proper goldberg tables in your test database: run ‘rake RAILS_ENV=test goldberg:plugin_migrations‘. Also, I am assuming you have used goldberg’s admin interface to create a user to test with - you have, haven’t you ?

Live Free and DRY Hard

For my project, I created two helper methods in test_helper.rb called goldberg_setup and goldberg_migrate. The first method has the single line (GoldbergMigration.load_bootstrap) and the second one has the code that the functional tests require.

For those who know not

The goldberg plugin, currently at version 0.2.1, is under active development, and the authors are active at the Goldberg community forum.

Thanks to unclecheese whose travails preceded mine.