Restore faker for development environments

[eileen-nava]

🛠 Summary of changes

Shane and I worked on this during our 1:1. The user mailer was broken because faker was missing. I included a screenshot of the error. We restored faker and the user mailer looks a-okay now.

📜 Testing Plan

• Confirm you can view an email at http://localhost:3000/rails/mailers/user_mailer/in_person_ready_to_verify_reminder

👀 Screenshots

Error:

[eileen-nava]

Related PR https://github.com/18F/identity-idp/pull/11757/files

[zachmargolis]

let's add an explicit require in the mailer preview too? or maybe a comment here noting why it's here?

Suggested change

	gem 'faker'
	gem 'faker', require: false # used in mailer previews

[eileen-nava]

Is the motivation making the bundle smaller, so that performance is improved? Or ensuring that faker doesn't mistakenly get removed from development in the future?
I'm not against the change, just want to be sure I understand the benefit.

[zachmargolis]

the comment is to make sure it doesn't get removed in the future

the require: false is because we don't strictly need that in memory for our "normal" production flow so this just helps keep things small and explicit

[mitchellhenke]

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, moving from :test to the :development, :test group shouldn't impact production?

[aduth]

I think the idea is to avoid auto-requiring the gem via Bundler when running the application locally, which wouldn't have happened previously but will happen if it's moved into the development group.

identity-idp/config/application.rb

Line 23 in c1cda40

Bundler.require(*Rails.groups)

$ rails c
[1] pry(main)> Rails.groups
=> [:default, "development"]

[mitchellhenke]

Yeah, that aspect makes sense. I wasn't sure I understood where the production aspect fit in.

[eileen-nava]

Hey, I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze on this change. After adding require: false, I realized that it caused NameError: uninitialized constant Faker errors when running specs that uses faker, e.g. bundle exec rspec spec/forms/idv/address_form_spec.rb.

I tried to add require 'faker' to the rails_helper below line 16, but that didn't resolve the error. Then I tried adding require 'faker' to the spec_helper, but that also didn't resolve the error.

Is there a way to get faker required everywhere it's used in the codebase specs without having to add require 'faker' to the top of each individual file?

[zachmargolis]

I am surprised that spec_helper wasn't enough, let me check out this branch and noodle on it. But for the sake of expediency and fixing the build, I wouldn't hold up this PR on require: false

[eileen-nava]

Thanks, @zachmargolis! Yeah, I was also really surprised that including it in spec_helper didn't help.... 🤔

[zachmargolis]

I tried another approach entirely in #11791, which is just to remove usage of Faker in the mailer preview

[eileen-nava]

I'm closing this PR in favor of #11791.