Making factory_girl even easier on Rails

factory_girl is pretty sweet. I’m not going over to rehash its awesomeness, but you can check out its website.

Not that it was difficult to use with Rails, but now it’s even easier.

I present to you the-oh-so-creatively-named factory_girl_on_rails.

script/plugin install git://github.com/technicalpickles/factory_girl_on_rails.git

This plugin allows you to place factory definitions in test/factories, and the plugin will automatically load them.

Additionally, it provides a simple generator for creating new factories:

./script/generate factory account

This creates an Account factory: test/factories/account_factory.rb

./script/generate factory post title:string body:text published:boolean

This creates a Post factory with a string title, text body, and published flag.

Overall, this plugin doesn’t do a whole lot, but I had to do this kind of thing by hand on enough projects that I figured it was worth it.