Stubbing CONSTANTS with RSpec

There’s not any great info out there about stubbing constants. In fact, you can’t stub constants. What you can do is reinitialize them.

The following code is trouble because Ruby complains about reinitializing the constant:

it 'changes the constant' do
  MyClass::SOME_CONSTANT = [1,2,3]
  MyClass::SOME_CONSTANT.should == [1,2,3]
end

#=> warning: already initialized constant SOME_CONSTANT

The spec passes but I hate the warning message Ruby spits out. So here’s how we can prevent this warning and achieve the same result:

it 'changes the constant' do
  MyClass.send(:remove_const, 'SOME_CONSTANT')
  MyClass::SOME_CONSTANT = [1,2,3]
  MyClass::SOME_CONSTANT.should == [1,2,3]
end

We explicitly remove the constant before reinitializing it. We use #send to access #remove_const because it’s a private method. Happy stubbing!

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