starting rails in test environment

Question

I'm trying to load up rails in the test environment using a ruby script. I've tried googling a bit and found this recommendation:

require "../../config/environment"
ENV['RAILS_ENV'] = ARGV.first || ENV['RAILS_ENV'] || 'test'

This seems to load up my environment alright, but my development database is still being used. Am I doing something wrong?

Here is my database.yml file... however I don't think it is the issue

development:
  adapter: mysql
  encoding: utf8
  reconnect: false
  database: BrianSite_development
  pool: 5
  username: root
  password: dev
  host: localhost

# Warning: The database defined as "test" will be erased and
# re-generated from your development database when you run "rake".
# Do not set this db to the same as development or production.
test:
  adapter: mysql
  encoding: utf8
  reconnect: false
  database: BrianSite_test
  pool: 5
  username: root
  password: dev
  host: localhost

production:
  adapter: mysql
  encoding: utf8
  reconnect: false
  database: BrianSite_production
  pool: 5
  username: root
  password: dev
  host: localhost

I can't use

ruby script/server -e test

because I'm trying to run ruby code after I load rails. More specifically what I'm trying to do is: run a .sql database script, load up rails and then run automated tests. Everything seems to be working fine, but for whatever reason rails seems to be loading in the development environment instead of the test environment.

Here is a shortened version of the code I am trying to run:

system "execute mysql script here"

require "../../config/environment"
ENV['RAILS_ENV'] = ARGV.first || ENV['RAILS_ENV'] || 'test'

describe Blog do
  it "should be initialized successfully" do
    blog = Blog.new
  end
end

I don't need to start a server, I just need to load my rails code base (models, controllers, etc..) so I can run tests against my code.

Thanks for any help.

UPDATE:

I have my rails environment now loading. Now I'm trying to run my test files within my rake task. Here is my code:

require"spec"
require "spec/rake/spectask"
RAILS_ENV = 'test'

namespace :run_all_tests do
  desc "Run all of your tests"

  puts "Reseting test database..."
  system "mysql --user=root --password=dev < C:\\Brian\\Work\\Personal\\BrianSite\\database\\BrianSite_test_CreateScript.sql"
  puts "Filling database tables with test data..."
  system "mysql --user=root --password=dev < C:\\Brian\\Work\\Personal\\BrianSite\\database\\Fill_Test_Tables.sql"

  puts "Starting rails test environment..."
  task :run => :environment do
    puts "RAILS_ENV is #{RAILS_ENV}"
    require "spec/models/blog_spec.rb"
  end
end

I thought the require "spec/models/blog_spec.rb" file would do it, but it doesn't seem to run the tests...

Thanks for the help thus far.

Answer 1

to start test environment you should run script/server with -e param:

ruby script/server -e test

and in your config/database.yml must be defenition of test env database, i.e.:

test:
  adapter: sqlite3
  database: db/test.sqlite3
  pool: 5
  timeout: 5000

Answer 2

You know you can run your unit, functional and integration tests from Rake, right ? Check out the output of rake -T test to see how.

In case you need something more custom, you can create your own Rake task. Put something like this in a file in lib/tasks:

namespace :custom_tests do
  desc "Run my custom tests"
  task :run => :environment do
    puts "RAILS_ENV is #{RAILS_ENV}"
    system "execute mysql script here"
    # Do whatever you need to do
  end
end

The => :environment loads the current environment for you. Then, you can run your task in the test environment like this: RAILS_ENV=test rake custom_tests:run