How can I make Rspec see my services folder?

Question

I'm trying to get a deeper understanding about how RSpec and Rails loads files, more than solving this specific issue.

My rails application has a common structure, with a new folder:

my_app/
      /assets
      /controllers
      /...
      /services (new folder)
      /spec

In the spec folder I have a test. At this moment, it only tests the creation of a new instance of my class

require 'rails_helper'
RSpec.describe MyClass do
    context 'something' do
        it 'does something' do
            instance = MyClass.new
        end
    end
end

MyClass is a bit special, because in it's constructor a dependency from other of my classes is injected:

class MyClass
     def initialize(dependency = MyDependency.new)
         @dependency = dependency
     end
end

And to make it a bit more complicated, MyDependency belongs to a group of common classes, that inherits from a base class:

require 'my_base'
class MyDependency < MyBase
end

This code fails with the following exception:

Failure/Error: instance = MyClass.new
 NoMethodError:
   undefined method `value' for nil:NilClass

My test is in the same folder than spec_helper.rb. This helper starts with:

ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= 'test'
require File.expand_path("../../config/environment", __FILE__)
require 'rspec/rails'

I don't understand what is the mechanism that allows RSpec to access the rails files, and also my services folder. It should consider, MyClass, MyBase and finally MyDependency.

Answer 1

RSpec relies on Rails and Ruby autoloading and Rails and Ruby autoloading is explained in http://urbanautomaton.com/blog/2013/08/27/rails-autoloading-hell/. Autoloading may be unrelated to the error you showed above, however. To understand what's happening there, you should look at and (if you're interested in help) share the backtrace and associated code (e.g. what is calling .value).