Wrong url_for used when running full suite vs one type of tests

[januszm]

What Ruby, Rails and RSpec versions are you using?

Ruby version: 3.4.2
Rails version: 8.0.2
RSpec version: 3.13.3
RSpec Rails version: 7.1.1

Not sure if this belongs here or in rspec-core

Observed behaviour

When running full test suite with rspec spec or rake , tests use wrong url_for helper without access to routes. It results in the following error whenever link_to or similar code is used (e.g. in views):

     ActionView::Template::Error:
       arguments passed to url_for can't be handled. Please require routes or provide your own implementation

Everything works fine when running a single type of tests with rspec spec/requests.

BAD, full test suite:
actionview-8.0.1/lib/action_view/helpers/url_helper.rb

def url_for(options = nil) # :nodoc:
  case options
  when String
    options
  when :back
    _back_url
  else
    raise ArgumentError, "arguments passed to url_for can't be handled. Please require " \
                         "routes or provide your own implementation"
  end
end

vs GOOD, subdirectory of spec

actionview-8.0.1/lib/action_view/routing_url_for.rb

def url_for(options = nil)
  # ...
    if options[:only_path]
      polymorphic_path(components, options)
    else
      polymorphic_url(components, options)
    end
  else
    method = _generate_paths_by_default ? :path : :url
    builder = ActionDispatch::Routing::PolymorphicRoutes::HelperMethodBuilder.public_send(method)

    # ...
  end
end

Expected behaviour

In all cases test should have access to Rails routes.

[januszm]

It turned out in one of the specs I had

include Rails.application.routes.url_helpers

this caused the issue described above for all tests that run after this particular file. This also explains why running individual test subdirectories worked but the whole suite failed. I was able to pin down the faulty test file like this:

rspec spec/presenters/faulty_spec.rb spec/requests

It was just one file in one subdirectory that triggers the error. Now, weird thing is something changed in either Rails or RSpec recently because I had this test file in the app for 5 months already and it only started failing maybe a week ago.

[JonRowe]

Are you randomizing the specs? We've not changed anything in the past month that could affect this but it is plausible that you had a load ordering issue all along and just... randomly encountered this one day, if you have seeds for the older passing builds and your failing builds you should be able to verify this.

Closing for now as it seems related to your own suite but I'm happy to continue to help here if I can