Rails unit testing doesn't load fixtures

Question

rake test:units fails in my current application, because the needed data of the fixtures is missing.

If I'm loading the fixtures manually via rake db:fixtures:load RAILS_ENV=test the unit tests are working, but rake purges the test database.

My test_helper includes fixtures :all and my tests are inheriting from it - but the fixtures are simply not loading.

I'm kind of clueless at the moment and could really need some help!

I've tried a lot and I think it has to do with some environment settings or plugins used in this project. Does anyone know where to read about which files are loaded for the testing environment?

Answer 1

I finally found the problem, although the solutions is kind of hacky.

One plugin is relying that there is some data in the database, at least one row. So what happened was:

1. rake loads database schema
2. rake tries to load environment
3. environment includes plugin
4. plugin loading fails because of missing at least one row
5. no fixtures are loaded

The hacky solution is: put the needed data directly into schema and not into a fixtures, because it's loaded to late.

I'll search for a more convenient solution and will update this answer if I found one.

Answer 2

Another approach is to write your own custom rake task for testing.

For example:

---

task :test_units do

  RAILS_ENV = 'test' # Force the environment to test

  puts "Recreate the test database"
  Rake::Task['db:test:prepare'].invoke

  puts "Seed the database with fixtures"
  Rake::Task['db:fixtures:load'].invoke

  puts "Executing Unit Tests"
  Rake::Task['test:units'].prerequisites.clear 
  Rake::Task['test:units'].invoke
end

---

Answer 3

Put the call to fixtures :all in your test class, not the super class (test_helper). My guess is that initialization of the super class isn't working the way you're expecting and that fixtures :all isn't be called. Perhaps try putting the call in the initialize method of test_helper.

My test/test_helper.rb looks like this:

ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'test'
require File.expand_path('../../config/environment', __FILE__)
require 'rails/test_help'

class ActiveSupport::TestCase
  # Setup all fixtures in test/fixtures/*.yml for all tests in alphabetical order.
  fixtures :all

  # Add more helper methods to be used by all tests here...
end

Answer 4

Not sure if you already did this, but export the test data from the database to the yml files in test/fixtures using a plugin like ar_fixtures

Answer 5

I had the same problem. Or rather, the problem was that my fixtures were not current with the database schema. Instead of throwing an exception, rails just used the test database as a fallback solution. Most iffy.

Answer 6

My problem is forgot to put "require 'test_helper'" at the head. eg.

require 'test_helper'

class AdminUserTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase
  # test "the truth" do
  #   assert true
  # end
end