I'm going to try to answer my own question. I tracked down this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23819312/rails-undefined-method-user-index-pathEnter code here.
The most important sentence tompave wrote in https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23819312/rails-undefined-method-user-index-path is this: A model with a plural name, e.g. class Users, will confuse rails. > Analysis: I was following along on https://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/authorization-with-pundit--cms-28202 And one can find there rails generate scaffold Articles title:string body:text This generates a warning [WARNING] The model name 'Articles' was recognized as a plural, using the > singular 'Article' instead. Override with --force-plural or setup custom > inflection rules for this noun before running the generator. The second most important sentence in tompave's answer is > Normally it would be user_path for singular routes (show, update, delete) > and users_path for the plural ones (index, create). Here, however, > users_path must be used for the singular routes, and Rails will fallback > to use users_index_path for index and create. The person who coded up the Rspec test seems to have known using the plural form "Articles" would generate the articles_index_path method rather than article_path. And thus my confusion has been addressed. I wish I could thank tompave directly -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rubyonrails-talk/7af92c34-b723-4839-ad0b-8b34c483de9e%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.