Passing Devise token in specs for Rails 5 API

Question

I have a basic Rails API built with Accounts and Users. All of the account specs pass when I remove...

before_action :authenticate_user!

But with that in place, I'm having trouble getting the specs to pass.

# Note `json` is a custom helper to parse JSON responses
RSpec.describe 'Account API', type: :request do
  # test data
  let!(:user) { create(:user) }
  let!(:accounts) { create_list(:account, 10, user_id: user.id) }
  let(:account_id) { accounts.first.id }

  # GET /accounts
  describe 'GET /accounts' do
    # HTTP request before examples
    before do
      get '/accounts'
      request.headers.merge! user.create_new_auth_token
    end

    it 'returns accounts' do
      expect(json).not_to be_empty
      expect(json.size).to eq(10)
    end

    it 'returns status code 200' do
      expect(response).to have_http_status(200)
    end
  end
end

As you can see I attempted to merge the auth token with this line in a before do block...

request.headers.merge! user.create_new_auth_token

But that is not working. Instead I get json.size == 1 and http_status of 401 unauthorized.

Answer 1

I was able to fix it by declaring a variable at the top...

let(:auth_headers) { create(:user).create_new_auth_token }

And in my specs using it like this...

before { get '/accounts', headers: auth_headers }