The first couple times I run rspec spec, I receive failures and if I run it again and thereafter, it passes. Why is this happening and how do I fix it?
This appears to be related to uniqueness code to prevent adding a record with a name that has already been. Below is the test that consistently fails the first time:
it { should validate_uniqueness_of(:name).case_insensitive.with_message(/has already been taken. Please use a different name./) }
The full repo can be found here: https://github.com/melissajstudent/koth
You are right in thinking that the uniquess is a good indicator of what’s happening. Likely your test database has some remaining records from the last time you ran the tests and is trying to creat records with the same factories.
To that end, there are a few ways to clean your database in between runs of your test suites. Sometimes it’s helpful just to run bundle exec rake db:test:prepare Before running your test suite. In other cases you can implement some more robust database cleaning throughout your run with the database cleaner gem: https://github.com/DatabaseCleaner/database_cleaner
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I've had a weird event of having rake test and rake test:functionals producing different results on a Rails 3 app that uses fixtures to insert test database records. The first group was failing on one of the controller tests, while the other one was successfully passing.
I also tried to run the failing test with ruby -I test path/to/file and zeus test path/to/file, but those runs were successful. The issue was reproduced on different machines. The test was failing because of the state of the test database, which seemed impossible to me when I looked at the fixtures.
Strangely enough, the issue disappeared the next day and I no longer can reproduce it. What could be the cause of such a problem and how to avoid it?
I used to have 3 fixtures in my RSpec tests. I have removed them and went with the FactoryGirl approach. The problem is that, when I run my tests, even though I have no trace of fixtures left, they still appear when running the tests.
If I debug the tests, I can see that the fixtures' creation date is old, older than the objects created when running the current test.
I believe fixtures are somewhere cached, how can I clear this cache? Or, if this is not the case, why are the old fixtures there when running the tests?
rake db:setup will reload your test database from your schema.rb, erasing your fixture data.
After some deep digging, I found out that some sourced files were setting an env var with the development db, not the test db. Pretty trivial mistake, but so hard to find.
As a conclusion, if others stumble upon weird problems like this one, be sure to check whether you are using the right environment variables/configuration options in your app.
How do I get rails to call db:seed before running my test suite? It appears that some task is being called that recreates the db, but doesn't call seed. Calling rake db:reset does both - it rebuilds the db and re-runs the seed scripts. How do I do this as part of rake test, or at the very least prevent test from resetting the db?
So I finally figured this out on my own (spent two days chasing). The db was being seeded from seeds.rb, but I happened to have empty fixture yaml files for the tables I was looking at. Looking at this SO question gave me the idea to delete them, and voila - seed data abounds.
I won't accept this answer for a little while to give someone a chance to provide a better explanation, but thought I'd throw this out there.
I start with a test database containing the schema but with no data in the tables. I run a test like so
cd test/
ruby unit/directive_test.rb
I get failures indicating that the code found no data in the data tables. However, I look at the tables after running that test and the data is now in the the table. In fact, if I immediately run the test again I get no failures.
So it appears that the fixture is being loaded into the table too late for one of my modules to find it.
When are the fixtures loaded? After or before the app/model/*.rb files are executed?
If it is after the models are executed is there a way to delay the loading?
This issue is also relevant when running rake test:units since that task clears the test data after it finished.
first of all see this thread and see if it can help you.
if you run the rail task rake test:units it will for sure load all fixtures before you run your code. if you are running just the test, and your unit test has no reference to the test_help.rb probably it is not loading the fixtures. You should try to run it through the rake tasks.
Another tip that i give you is that you forget the fixtures and use factories (here i recommend factory_girl). It takes sometime to get used, but it worth. Fixtures are too hard to manage, update and etc.
there is another post explaing little about the concept behind factories.
When I want to run all my unit tests, I run rake test:units. To run all my functional tests, I run rake test:functionals. If I want to run all the test cases in one file, I run
ruby test/unit/username_test.rb
A few people have been telling me I should run rake instead such as
rake test:units TEST=test/unit/username_test.rb
For running tests, they say I should always run rake. I know I should run rake if I'm testing all my unit tests. But what if it's just one file or one particular test method in a file that I'm testing? Should I still use rake? Is there any difference between the two? Do I get any benefit from running rake over ruby? Is there any disadvantage to running ruby rather than rake?
Sadly, the two are not the same. Running the tests under rake can wind up pulling things from different places than when you run the test directly (more a problem when you have multiple versions of gems, etc. on your system).
The intent is that tests run under rake should be in an environment that matches what rails would produce; I can not attest to how closely they match, but I have seen tests that passed when run directly but failed when run via rake or rails (and visa versa).
Before checking in at the very least I'd recommend running rake to hit everything, in order to be assured that nothing unexpected has broken.
Plain ruby seems ideal for fast testing of single files during iterations.
Be aware that running everything through rake can produce different results to running everything individually, as I found to my confusion recently - I was doing something slightly wrong in one test that worked successfully in isolation but that left a problem lying around for a subsequent test that only showed up when I used rake.
No I dont think so. Rake seems to be a convenient way to run all tests, all unit tests or all functional/controller tests.
For a single file, I use the ruby object_test.rb approach.. shorter and works fine for my rails home project.
They should be identical. if they are not, you're definitely doing something wrong.
As I said in my other comments, if you get tests that pass in one, but fail in the other, you're doing something very wrong; this indicates a poor test setup, and is usually caused by a different test run order between the two test approaches; one of which causes tests to fail.
Usually the cause of this is that you are not using transactions and/or tests are not cleaning up after themselves. For example, not properly requiring the fixtures they later test for, and instead relying on the pre-existing database state.
you are free to use either method. if something breaks, you're doing something wrong in your tests, and you should fix your code.
The two are not the same. Rake will do some preliminary test loading.
The intent is that tests run under rake should be in an environment that matches what rails would produce;
One difference I've noticed is with rake some of the fixture loading happens which could be by-passed with ruby.
I'd recommend using rake, unless you are using the ruby command line to one just one test in the file with the -n option.