getting past authentication with capybara in rails application - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm trying to use capybara on a ruby on rails application to do some content testing, as well I'm using the devise gem to implement user authentication. I'm having trouble logging into my application to perform my test cases.
Initially, my scenario was as follows:
scenario "User arrives at main page" do
visit "purchase_orders#index"
page.should have_content("All")
# some more tests and checks
end
Where purchase_orders#index is the authenticated root, where a user's purchase orders are shown.
But when I was running the tests, I was getting the following error :
expected to find text "All" in "Log in to manage your orders * Email * Password Forgot your password? Remember me Sign up • Didn't receive confirmation instructions? About Us • Contact Us •
which tells me that its not getting past the log in page. I next tried adding the following to my scenario, before running the tests, to make it log in:
visit "purchase_orders#index"
fill_in('Email', :with => 'username#gmail.com')
fill_in('Password', :with => 'password')
click_button('Log in')
where username and password are actual created accounts, but again it fails and doesn't get past the sign in page. Finally, I tried adding a before(:each) method, as follows, to attempt to sign users in for test cases:
before(:each) do
visit "users/sessions#new"
fill_in('Email', :with => 'nico.dubus17#gmail.com')
fill_in('Password', :with => 'password')
click_button('Log in')
end
which, again, did not work for me. So my question is: What is the best practice and syntax for getting past the sign in page, and into the actual application? I've looked for documentation and answers on this, but haven't found anything.
Thank you!

Answer 1

Found an answer. I installed the warden gem to (gem 'warden') and factory girl gem (gem "factory_girl_rails", "~> 4.0") and ran a bundle install. I then created a user fixture with factory girl as follows in a factory.rb file in the spec folder:
# This is a user factory, to simulate a user object
FactoryGirl.define do
factory :user, class: User do
first_name "John"
last_name "Doe"
email "nico_dubus#hotmail.com"
encrypted_password "password"
end
end
in my rails helper file, I added this line to be able to use FactoryGirl's methods without calling it on the class every time:
config.include FactoryGirl::Syntax::Methods
Afterwards, I added these lines to the top of my capybara test page:
include Warden::Test::Helpers
Warden.test_mode!
Finally, I built a user object to use within the scope of the test:
user = FactoryGirl.build(:user)
And whenever I need to log in, I use warden's log in method
login_as(user, :scope => :user)
And voila!