rspec shows fails where routes work OK - what's up? - problem gone away

This is weird. Looking again at my workstation this morning and running rspec spec/ to try to get some example error output to show here, all my tests succeed! I haven't changed any of the sources and I don't think I've changed anything in the config or setup (although I'm new to mac too so many of the tools are a bit like smoke 开发者_运维问答and mirrors to me).

Now I'm in a position where I know something was wrong but don't know what, and I know it's now OK, but I don't know why.

I'm going to assume there was some process that got killed and restarted overnight or when the machine woke up, and hope that I can encourage a similar fix if I get unexplained fails in the future.

What follows is now moot...

Working through a tutorial I have 5 simple routes and 5 tests just prove that the correct page is returned by checking the title in the content. All the routes work perfectly via a browser, but rspec shows 3 fails.

These are my routes...

match '/contact', :to => 'pages#contact'
match '/about', :to => 'pages#about'
match '/help', :to => 'pages#help'
match '/signup', :to => 'users#new'  
root :to => 'pages#home'

rspec shows that /contact, /about and /help all get the root page (wrong), but /signup gets the proper page. / gets the home page too.

My tutorial book has no further detail and simply expects the code example to work.

The site generated works OK, it just doesn't test OK. I can continue with the tutorial but I don't want to gt into the habit of ignoring test fails.

Can anyone suggest a next step?

my tests...

require spec_helper
  describe "LayoutLinks" do
  .
  it "should have a contact page at '/contact'" do
    get '/contact
    response.should have_selector('title', :content => "Contact")
  end 
  .
  it "should have a signup page at '/signup'" do
    get '/signup'
    response.should have_selector('title', :content => "Sign up")
  end
end

My controllers...

class UsersController < ApplicationController
  def new
    @title = "Sign up"
  end
end

class PagesController < ApplicationController
  def contact
    @title = "Contact"
  end

  def home
    @title = "Home"
  end
  .
  .

end

My application.html.erb has

<title><%= @title %></title>

and each view is given its own title by a helper

module ApplicationHelper
  def title
    base_title = "Ruby on Rails Tutorial Sample App"
    if @title.nil?
      base_title
    else
      "#{base_title} | #{@title}"
    end
  end
end

---

Are you using spork? If so, when changing your routes (and some other base configuration), you need to restart it for it to pick up your changes.