Path helper methods not available in all RSpec files

Question

I'm roughly following the Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl, right now I'm trying to set up a few RSpec tests. This is my routes.rb

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  root 'static_pages#home'
  get  '/help',    to: 'static_pages#help'
  get  '/about',   to: 'static_pages#about'
  get  '/contact', to: 'static_pages#contact'
  get  '/signup',  to: 'users#new'
end

I have a spec/integration/site_layout_spec.rb file in which I can use helper methods such as signup_path:

# site_layout_spec.rb

require 'rails_helper'

RSpec.describe 'Root' do
  it 'shows the home page' do
    get signup_path # just to show it's working
    get root_path
    expect(root_path).to render_template('static_pages/home')
  end
end

I also have a file spec/controllers/users_controller_spec.rb. In this file, none of the *_path helper methods seems to work.

# user_controller_spec.rb

require 'rails_helper'

RSpec.describe 'User signup page' do
  it 'should be available' do
    get signup_path
    expect(signup_path).to exist
  end
end

When running rspec, I get

Failure/Error: get signup_path
NoMethodError: undefined method `signup_path' for nil:NilClass
# ./spec/controllers/users_controller_spec.rb:5:in `block (2 levels) in <main>'

Why don't the helpers work in my second test?

Answer 1

The latter is a controller spec, there you're expected to test controller without routing, by calling it's actions:

get :new