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Using Mocha with Rails 3 and Test::Unit

As I mentioned in my previous post, there's been some recent confusion over which versions of Mocha are compatible with which versions of Rails. In this post, I explain how to use Mocha with Rails and Test::Unit.

Unfortunately due to Rails relying on Mocha & Test::Unit internals, there is a problem with using recent released versions of Rails with the latest version of Mocha and recent versions of the Test::Unit gem. You may see errors like these:

Rails 3.0.x

    .../gems/ruby/1.9.1/gems/activesupport-3.0.19/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:483:in `load_missing_constant':
      Mocha::Integration is not missing constant AssertionCounter! (ArgumentError)

Rails 3.1.x

    .../gems/ruby/1.9.1/gems/activesupport-3.1.10/lib/active_support/testing/setup_and_teardown.rb:108:in `retrieve_mocha_counter':
      uninitialized constant Mocha::Integration::TestUnit::AssertionCounter (NameError)

Rails 3.2.x

    .../gems/ruby/1.9.1/gems/activesupport-3.2.11/lib/active_support/testing/setup_and_teardown.rb:110:in `retrieve_mocha_counter':
      uninitialized constant Mocha::MonkeyPatching (NameError)

There are a couple of ways to fix these errors:

Option 1 - Use "edge" Rails or one of the relevant "stable" branches of Rails

    # Gemfile
    gem "rails", git: "git://github.com/rails/rails.git", branch: "3-2-stable"
    group :test do
      gem "mocha", :require => false

    # test/test_helper.rb
    require "mocha/setup"

Although obviously it isn't ideal using an unreleased version of Rails. You could always lock things down further by using the Bundler :ref option to restrict the version of Rails to a specific SHA.

Option 2 - Downgrade to Mocha 0.12.8

    # Gemfile in Rails app
    gem "mocha", "~> 0.12.8", :require => false

    # At bottom of test_helper.rb
    require "mocha"

Note: This isn't as bad as it sounds, because there aren't many changes in Mocha 0.13.x that are not in 0.12.x. Please let us know if there are any fixes in 0.13.x that you need in 0.12.x and I will back-port them.

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