Email spec doesn't match body content in Rails - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm using email_spec gem to test a simple email, but for some reason the body content appears to be empty:
1) ContactMailer welcome email to new user renders the body
Failure/Error: mail.should have_body_text("Hi")
expected the body to contain "Hi" but was ""
# ./spec/mailers/contact_mailer_spec.rb:17:in `block (3 levels) in <top (required)>'
Every other example passes. The template file is called welcome_email.text.erb. Not sure why body is not matched, but the email does have a body when it gets sent.
Edit: the Rspec code is:
let(:mail) { ContactMailer.welcome_email(email) }
it "renders the body" do
mail.should have_body_text("Hi")
end

Answer 1

The best way I've found to do this is:
it "contains a greeting" do
mail.html_part.body.should match /Hi/
end
You can also use text_part in place of html_part if you want to check the plain text part of a multipart message.
Also note that others may recommend using #encoded, but I had trouble using that with long URLs, as they may get line-wrapped during the encoding process.

Answer 2

So, I was experiencing the same thing. I was trying to test my mailers without loading all of Rails.
What finally solved my problem was adding this to my test:
(note that my test is in test/unit/mailers/my_mailer_test.rb - you may have to adjust paths)
ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :test
ActionMailer::Base.view_paths = File.expand_path('../../../../app/views', __FILE__)
Basically, without the view paths pointing to your views directory, the template is not found and all the parts (html, text, etc) are blank.
NOTE: The directory specified is NOT the one the actual templates are in. The mailer knows to look for a directory in the template root named after the class itself.
Here's a sample in minitest/spec
require 'minitest/spec'
require 'minitest/autorun'
require "minitest-matchers"
require 'action_mailer'
require "email_spec"
# NECESSARY TO RECOGNIZE HAML TEMPLATES
unless Object.const_defined? 'Rails'
require 'active_support/string_inquirer'
class Rails
def self.env
ActiveSupport::StringInquirer.new(ENV['RAILS_ENV'] || 'test')
end
end
require 'haml/util'
require "haml/template"
end
# END HAML SUPPORT STUFF
require File.expand_path('../../../../app/mailers/my_mailer', __FILE__)
ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :test
ActionMailer::Base.view_paths = File.expand_path('../../../../app/views', __FILE__)
describe MyMailer do
include EmailSpec::Helpers
include EmailSpec::Matchers
let(:the_email){ MyMailer.some_mail() }
it "has the right bit of text" do
the_email.must have_body_text("some bit of text")
end
end