PATCH & PUT routes in Rails upgrade

Okay,

I'm in the middle of upgrading our Rails 3 application from Rails 3.2 onto Rails 4.2. After reading through the upgrade notes and the changes, we are running into a weird issue with some PUT and PATCH routes.

In our Rails 3 application, we have the following route defined:

resources :entities, except: [:show] do
  member do
    put :change_monitoring_status
  end
 end

When running rake routes, the change_monitoring_status route shows up as a proper PUT route. The form being generated for this using the Rails helpers generates the correct request in Rails 3.

In Rails 4 however, this form is now producing a PATCH route instead. Which is totally okay as this is now the standard behaviour in Rails. However, when we use the form on Rails 4 Production, this results in a 404 - Not Found.

We tried to write an RSpec test for this to mimic the same behaviour and close the bug ticket. So for our Rails 4 upgrade, we wrote the following test:

describe '#change_monitoring_status' do

  before(:each) do
    sign_in user
  end

  it 'fails when put is used' do
    expect {
      put :change_monitoring_status, id: entity.id, _method: "PUT", form_object: {  }
    }.to raise_error
  end

  it 'works when patch is used' do
    expect {
      patch :change_monitoring_status, id: supplier.id, _method: "PATCH", form_object: {  }
    }.to_not raise_error
  end
end

We also changed the route to be PATCH instead of PUT now.

---

This is the behaviour we are seeing:

• The PUT test fails on Rails 4, because no 404 is raised
• The PATCH test succeeds
• The PUT request works on production
• The PATCH request fails on production

The way we understand this, is not in line with the documentation. The form is generating a proper PATCH request, yet we cannot get the correct behaviour going in the RSpec tests.

What we expect:

• PUT to raise a 404
• PATCH to succeed

Gems used: * Rails 4.2 * RSpec 3.4 * RSpec-rails 3.4 * simple_form 3.2