Fixation

This gem will precompile the SQL statements needed to clear and repopulate your test tables with fixtures when the app boots under spring, so that spec startup just needs to run a small number of multi-row SQL statements to prepare for run. This takes around 1/10th the time as a normal fixture load.

Like ActiveRecord's normal fixture implementation, Fixation will load the model classes in order to use metadata about associations and enums. But since Fixation is run at the time spring starts, Fixation will then 'reload' rails (the same way spring does), so you can change your model classes and re-run tests without having to restart spring.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'fixation'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install fixation

Then, make an initializer:

if Rails.env.test? && Fixation.running_under_spring?
  Rails.application.config.after_initialize do
    Fixation.preload_for_spring
  end
end

And run spring stop so this gets picked up.

Finally, open up your spec_helper.rb, and find the current global_fixtures setting:

config.global_fixtures = :all

Change that to [] so that ActiveRecord doesn't load the fixtures again itself, and load the Fixation module:

config.global_fixtures = []
config.include Fixation.fixture_methods

Usage

Simply use run your tests under spring.

bundle exec spring spec/models/my_spec.rb

Limitations

You'll need to run rake tasks like db:create and db:test:prepare the normal way (without spring), because if the database doesn't exist or the schema isn't loaded, the initializer above will asplode.

Not all features of regular ActiveRecord fixtures are supported:

• HABTM support has not been implemented (does anyone use HABTM these days?)

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/willbryant/fixation.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.