DatabasePlumber

A common problem in test suites for large Rails applications is that, as they mature, balancing test speed and complexity often results in heavy use of tools like FactoryGirl and DatabaseCleaner.

These are powerful and useful tools, but over time it often becomes evident that large factories can create and orphan many rows in the database; combine with the need for non-transactional database maintenance during Capybara tests and its very easy to be plagued by mystery guests.

DatabasePlumber is a quick utility that checks for rows left after an example group has been executed, publishes a report and cleans up.

Well, for starters, it acts as a quick sticking plaster on the problem of mystery guests, giving you back confidence in your CI runs in the short term.

Long-term, it removes the fear from optimizing the persistence of objects using RSpec before(:all) blocks by making it clear when you, or your factories have not cleaned up properly after.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'database_plumber', github: 'brrygrdn/database_plumber'

And then execute:

$ bundle

To get started, add the following lines to your spec_helper.rb

RSpec.configure do |config|

  ...

  config.after(:each) do |example|
    DatabaseCleaner.clean
    # Notify DatabasePlumber of each example after it has been executed
    DatabasePlumber.log example
  end

  config.after(:all) do
    # Perform the report after each example group
    DatabasePlumber.inspect
  end

  ...

end

Run your tests as normal, and you'll see a report after any examples:

> bundle exec rspec spec/models/
.....
#### Leaking Test

  The spec './spec/models/foo_spec.rb' leaves
  the following rows in the database:

     - 1 row(s) for the Foo model
     - 5 row(s) for the Bar model

#### What now?

  If you are using let! or before(:all) please ensure that you use a
  corresponding after(:all) block to clean up these rows.

..........

Finished in 3.14159 seconds
15 examples, 0 failures

Randomized with seed 17015

You may have some models that you don't want to report on, for example a configuration table that is seeded or loaded with fixtures as part of test suite setup.

config.after(:all) do
  # Perform the report after each example group
  DatabasePlumber.inspect ignored_models: [Bar, Baz]
end

You may have models in your application backed by multiple adapters, some of which may be throw-away after each example group e.g. using SQLite for anonymous models

To exclude all models from a given adapter, you can add the following:

config.after(:all) do
  # Perform the report after each example group
  DatabasePlumber.inspect ignored_adapters: [:sqlite]
end

If you are unsure of which adapter to ignore, you can check via the Rails console:

  > Foo.connection.adapter_name
  'PostgreSQL'
  # The corresponding symbol to use is :postgresql

When debugging a suite with several mystery guests, you can halt immediately after each leak.

config.after(:all) do
  # Perform the report after each example group
  DatabasePlumber.inspect ignored_models: [Bar, Baz],
                          ignored_adapters: [:sqlite],
                          brutal: true
end

You may have some models you would like to report on, but which should also have entries in the database, for example a table that is seeded or loaded with fixtures. In order to allow this you can provide a threshold for a Model, which is the maximum number of entries allowed in the database for the Model before it is regarded as leaky.

To provide a threshold for a Model, you can can the following:

config.after(:all) do
  # Perform the report after each example group
  DatabasePlumber.inspect model_thresholds: { Bar => 3 }
end

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/brrygrdn/database_plumber/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request