Weird Issue with rspec and authlogic-openid

May 24 2009

I’ve been playing around rspec in my application which also uses AuthLogic’s OpenID.  When doing

rake spec 

I get the following, very weird error:

(in /Users/Michael/r/wc)
/Users/Michael/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/base.rb:1964:in `method_missing': undefined method `config' for #<Class:0x263efdc> (NoMethodError)
from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/authlogic-oid-1.0.3/lib/authlogic_openid/acts_as_authentic.rb:35:in `optional_fields='
from /Users/Michael/r/wc/app/models/user.rb:3
from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/authlogic-2.0.13/lib/authlogic/acts_as_authentic/base.rb:37:in `acts_as_authentic'
from /Users/Michael/r/wc/app/models/user.rb:2
from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require'
from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'

As seen above I’m using version 1.0.3 of the source code.  For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong.  What was even stranger was the code was working when running the site.  It turns out, config got changed to rw_config, and the gem repository at rubyforge hasn’t been updated to the latest 1.0.4 which includes this change:

Change from using config to the new rw_config. Requires the latest version 
of authlogic. config was too general of a name and was causing conflicts 
for people in their own projects.

So I changed the acts_as_authentic.rb file so config is named rw_config, and everything worked fine.

I’d love to find a good reference on how rspec loads gems, and why this isn’t an issue when running the site.  I’m also interested in knowning how to pull content as a gem from github source (the openid gem isn’t at gems.github.com).