title: Alternatives to factory_girl
body: <p>In my opinion and for my purposes, <code>factory_girl</code> completely sucks. Some limitations include:</p>
  
  <h3>No debugging support</h3>
  
  <p>If I include <code>debugger</code> statements, they are treated as model attributes. Instead of invoking the debugger, I just get strange errors.</p>
  
  <pre><code>FactoryGirl.define do 
    factory :admin do
      name do
        debugger # &lt;-- Does not work.
        Forgery(:name).full_name
      end
  
      email                 { Forgery(:email).address }
  
      debugger # &lt;-- Does not work either.
  
      password              "secret"
    end
  end
  </code></pre>
  
  <h3>Limitations to associations</h3>
  
  <p>Am I too stupid or is there no elegant way to add two posts to a user?</p>
  
  <pre><code>FactoryGirl.define do
    factory :post do
      title "Foobar"
      content "Some content"
    end
  
  
    factory :user do
      name { Forgery(:name).full_name }
      email                 { Forgery(:email).address }
  
      # This does not work, if the Post model requires Post#user to be set.
      posts [FactoryGirl.create(:post), FactoryGirl.create(:post)]
    end
  end
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>See also <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5370266/factory-girl-why-are-records-being-continually-created">Factory Girl - Why are Records being continually created?</a></p>
  
  <h3>Tends to trigger strange bugs in rails</h3>
  
  <p>I can't remeber what happend, but often strange problems arise with factory_girl.</p>
  
  <p>So given these examples. Are there any alternatives to factory_girl that do not have these issues?</p>