Why are you adding this if you've added these files? Shouldn't they be tracked?

line 51 tells git to ignore all .pdf files so line 52 specifies an exception (by prefixing an exclamation mark) to track the pdf files in spec/fixtures/files

added a comment to clarify in 0d53723

That's really confusing. If you want a helper method, why not define it as a method, and people can run it from the Rails console?

to generate the pdf files correctly, the helper method generating the file needs to have the same test environment setup as the actual test itself. This way you don't have to repeat code setting up the test environment. I did research but I could not figure out a better way to do it without duplicating code.

you can call this method from the terminal by calling the test's line number e.g. bundle exec rspec spec/pdfs/distribution_pdf_spec.rb:227.

I added a comment clarifying this in 0d53723

alternatively I could delete the method if you want, but I found it super helpful because I could just run that line whenever I made changes to the pdf generation and regenerate the test files. so if anyone in the future makes changes they could do the same thing.

There should definitely be a way to do this without duplicating code. Maybe it's the setup that needs to be extracted to a base method that's called from both places. And worse comes to worst, if you do need to duplicate a few lines of code, it's still a lot less messy than a test that's not actually a test.

I came up with a solution which checks for an environment variable and if it's set to true to overwrite the expected PDFs in 4516951 . I think it's a lot cleaner, let me know if that works.

There's no need to do this via instance variables. Here's how I'd do it to keep the RSpec looking the same:

let(:storage_creation) { create_organization_storage_items }
let(:organization) { storage_creation.organization }
let(:item1) { storage_creation.items[0] }
# etc.

See below where you can change this method to make it easier to work with.

I'd define a struct above, something like

StorageCreation = Data.define(:organization, :storage_location, :items)

and here you could return

StorageCreation.new(org, storage_location, [item1, item2, item3, item4])

If this setup is being used outside RSpec, it shouldn't be in spec/support and it shouldn't use FactoryBot. It should work more like the seeds file where you create data manually. Probably should live in its own folder under the /lib directory.

Are you actually creating file paths here? Or just returning the ones you have specified?