December 04, 2011

Combining FactoryGirl's Generated Files Into One

If you are using Thoughtbot’s FactoryGirl in a Rails 3 app, you are probably accustomed to the library generating a new file per factory/model it generates. You end up with something like this:

$ ls test/factories
things.rb other_things.rb more_things.rb omg_things.rb

I really dislike it generating a file per factory. I prefer one file in which I can see each factory I will be using in my tests. I am, evidently, the odd man out. I dug around the Interwebs a bit, unsuccessfully. This led to me fixing it myself witha Rake task:

namespace :factories do
  desc 'Combine individual factory files into a single file'
  task :combine do
    File.open(File.join(Rails.root, 'test', 'factories.rb'), 'a') do |f|
      Dir.foreach(File.join(Rails.root, 'test', 'factories')) do |factory|
        next if factory == '.' or factory == '..'
        full_path = File.join(Rails.root, 'test', 'factories', factory)
        text = File.read(full_path)
        f.write(text)
        puts "Removing #{full_path}..."
        File.delete(full_path)
      end
    end
    puts "Removing the factories directory..."
    Dir.rmdir(File.join(Rails.root, 'test', 'factories'))
    print "Done."
  end
end

I run that whenever I have generated a new model or resource (and thus a new factory file).

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