Rebecca’s Ramblings

Your rails app comes with 2 tasks to clone your database structure into the test database: db:test:clone, which does everything through ruby, and db:test:clone_structure, which dumps the SQL needed to recreate the database structure, then reloads it, in a DB-specific fashion. You can switch which version is run by the db:test:prepare task in environment.rb.

Find this bit:

# Use Active Record's schema dumper instead of SQL when creating the test database
# (enables use of different database adapters for development and test environments)
# config.active_record.schema_format = :ruby


Uncomment the last line shown above, and replace :ruby with :sql - that’s it!

If, like me, you’re using postgres databases, this does the trick - now db:test:prepare dumps the structure of your dev/production database using pg_dump -s … and loads it into the test database using psql.

A couple of caveats:

• If you’re using functions written in a language that needs to be created after a new database is created, you must connect to your test database as a superuser, as only superusers can add languages.
• If you’re using views in MySQL, the views are carefully removed from the dumped structure, so won’t be in your test database.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Rails, rake, PostgreSQL, testing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.