Delayed Job not processed in rspec

The simplest way to test queued Delayed::Job tasks in RSpec is to run them in real time. Simply add the following line to your RSpec tests:

Delayed::Worker.delay_jobs = false

This will cause your jobs to be processed immediately upon enqueuing, not in a separate thread. This is usually what you want for testing, since it’s deterministic.

Two caveats

• If you are trying to test for timing errors, race conditions, etc, this approach won’t help (since the jobs are processed in the same thread as RSpec)

• The current version of delayed_job (2.1.4) has a minor bug in which the callback hooks (enqueue, before, success, error, failure) don’t get called when Delayed::Worker.delay_jobs is set to false.

Two Workarounds

If you need to test the callback hooks I know of two workarounds:

• Fetch the latest master branch from github. (I haven’t tried that because I need a stable version)

• Instead of setting Delayed::Worker.delay_jobs = false, explicitly call DJ’s run mechanism in your test code as follows:

  successes, failures = Delayed::Worker.new.work_off

That will process whatever is in the job queue (again, in the same thread as the RSpec tests) and return two numbers: the # of jobs that succeeded and the # of jobs that failed. I currently use this approach and it does everything I need.