If you're in the default testing environment your rails cache is ActiveSupport::Cache::NullStore which will always succeed but it doesn't actually store or return anything.

There's an almost completely undocumented method called with_local_cache on NullStore that lets you run a block with a MemoryStore instead of a NullStore for the duration of the block. This happens because it prepends the ActiveSupport::Cache::Strategy::LocalCache class. This lets you test one or two things that require caching without enabling it on all tests and slowing everything down.

   Rails.cache.class.name
   # => "ActiveSupport::Cache::NullStore"
   Rails.cache.write("a", 3)
   # => true
   Rails.cache.read("a")
   # => nil
   Rails.cache.with_local_cache do
     Rails.cache.write("a", 5)
     p Rails.cache.read("a")
   end
   5
   # => 5