hunt for the bug
Spent three days last week hunting for mysterious bug which caused factory_girl factories randomly fail with ‘Trait not registered: class’ message during full test suite run. When you run all controller or model tests separately - everything was fine and all tests which were failing during full run worked perfectly.
At first I ignored this issue - I had just added two new factories, which coincidentally used ‘class’ parameter in their definition to specify generated class explicitly, and I needed these factories to develop code I was working on and I thought that I’ll fix or just remove these factories later.
But as it usually happens it was not as simple as I thought. Suddenly I discovered that tests started failing with the same symptoms on common ‘develop’ branch and not only on topic branch. And I broke tests already in two other places, so cleanup was really needed.
First two days I spent trying to find out what happening in factory_girl internals using old-school print logging and later pry-debugger but without much success except that I was able to locate single spec file in ./spec/workers/ which caused failure of all consecutive factory calls. Then I started looking at git history, trying to find commit which introduced this issue. Luckily, in spite of heavy rebasing and few backported commits, my ‘master’ branch didn't have this issue and I was able to pinpoint this to single commit. At first glance this commit looked almost innocent - it just extracted code from model and moved it to app/worker/ directory. But there were two tests added to failing spec file and they were the tests which caused cascading failure of all remaining factories in suite. After reviewing the code under test I had found that real culprit was memory leak debugging code I quickly slapped into 'master' without running tests:
counts = Hash.new { 0 }
ObjectSpace.each_object do |o|
counts[o.class] += 1
end
counts.reject! { |_k, v| v < 100 }
It seems that FactoryGirl::DefinitionsProxy undefines all methods including class and method_missing in this class adds any calls as traits to factory so walking through ObjectSpace and calling class on every object wreaks havoc on factories.