On page 131 the book says to copy menu.yml to test/fixtures. When I do this I get a bunch of errors because (I think) the test framework is trying to load the data into a menu table, and there is no menu table. The italicized text on that page says not to load that file using the standard test fixtures helper, but it does not say how to do this. It seems that as soon as you put the file in the fixtures directory the framework tries to load it into the db. I solved this by moving menu.yml to test/unit and changing the path to it in the menu_sidebar_test.

Is there a better way to solve this issue?

Is there a rails convention for where a non-fixture test data yaml file should live?

I get this error for every test when the file is in the /fixtures directory.

I think this might be a Rails version issue, at least in part. At some point, the test/test_helper.rb file added

which automatically loads all the fixtures. In the version that I have of this app locally, that line is not in the test_helper.rb file, instead each individual test file loads the fixtures it needs -- given later Rails conventions, I probably would have tried to figure out a different way to run this.

If your code has the fixtures :all line, then take it out and try again. If it's not there, then I'm not sure what the problem is.

Yup, test_helper.rb did have the line:
Commenting that line out caused a bunch of other errors. When I replaced that line with this:
and undid my other changes
all the tests passed.

Thanks very much for your help on this. I find it hard as a reader to keep up with the continuous revisions to rails, I'll bet it is much worse for an author.