Edit 2012-07-04: You won’t have those problems with latest rails and paperclip. As far as I know this only happens with rails 2.

I love paperclip. To be clear it just works. It makes what it has been designed for and makes it easy and flexible enough to do some other things.

However, there’s something with paperclip that always disappoints me, it have some problems when you want to install it as a gem, and, in my case, when you want to use it with bundler.

The problem is that it doesn’t load the rake tasks nor the should macros. Shoulda macros are loaded without problem if the gem is vendored in the project dir, since shoulda will look for it. But to load the macros when not vendored you need the following code on your test_helper.rb just before class ActiveSupport::TestCase.

That way the macros are properly load and you can use them on your tests.

To load the rake tasks you need a similar approach. Just include this line in your Rakefile. If you’re using Rails 3 it will properly load automatically the rake tasks for you so no need for this trick.