FactoryGirl association model trouble: "SystemStackError: stack level too deep"

According to the docs, you can't just put both sides of the associations into the factories. You'll need to use their after callback to set an object(s) to return.

For instance, in the factories/users/account.rb file, you put something like

after(:build) do |user_account, evaluator|
    user_account.user = FactoryGirl.build(:user, :account=>user_account)
end

For has_many associations, you'll need to use their *_list functions.

after(:build) do |user_account, evaluator|
    user_account.users = FactoryGirl.build_list(:user, 5, :account=>user_account)
end

Note: I believe the example in the docs is a bit misleading it doesn't assign anything to the object. I believe it should be something like (note the assignment).

# the after(:create) yields two values; the user instance itself and the
# evaluator, which stores all values from the factory, including ignored
# attributes; `create_list`'s second argument is the number of records
# to create and we make sure the user is associated properly to the post
after(:create) do |user, evaluator|
  user.posts = FactoryGirl.create_list(:post, evaluator.posts_count, user: user)
end