Find Or Create A Record With FactoryBot

I have a bunch of tests throughout my test suite that rely on a particular kind of unique record. Let's say it is a special admin user.

admin = FactoryBot.create(:user, email: '[e-mail]')

If this user has already been created then trying to re-create it with FactoryBot will result in a unique email validation error.

Another way to approach this would be to either find or create the admin user. In some standard Rails code that might look like this:

admin =
  User.find_by(email: '[e-mail]') ||
  FactoryBot.create(:user, email: '[e-mail]')

There is some repetitiveness to this that I'd like to avoid. FactoryBot doesn't have an equivalent to ActiveRecord's find_and_create_by, but we can work around this.

We can add an initialize_with directive to the User factory.

FactoryBot.define do
  factory :user do
    sequence(:email) { |n| 'user#{n}@example.com' }

    # a bunch of other attributes

    initialize_with { User.find_or_create_by(email: email) }
  end
end

With this in place, we can call FactoryBot.create with the already existing admin user and it will look up the record instead of raising a validation error.

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