Using FactoryGirl factories in Rails development fixtures

Development fixtures (what guides.rubyonrails.org refers to as ‘seed data’ ) tend to balloon and unDRY fairly quickly in a large application. Using FactoryGirl factories for fixtures can eliminate the clutter because you only need to specify model attributes when they need to diverge from your factory template defaults. I decided to try this in a brand new Rails 4.1.5 app this week. After defining my ‘Post’ factory in spec/factories/post.rb, I encountered an error while adding

FactoryGirl.create(:post)

to seed.rb:

NoMethodError: undefined method `delete' for nil:NilClass
    from /Users/dev/.rbenv/versions/2.1.1/lib/ruby/gems/2.1.0/gems/activerecord-4.1.5/lib/active_record/attribute_methods/write.rb:81:in `write_attribute_with_type_cast'

Turns out I had overriden Post#initialize without calling ‘super’, so my Post instance never inherited a ‘delete’ method. FactoryGirl assumes the existence of a ‘delete’ method on ActiveRecord instances it tries to create. Hope this will save someone a few minutes of time, as the error message doesn’t obviously point to this issue.

Environment:

rails (4.1.5) factory_girl_rails (4.5.0)