RSpec Active Record Formatter

Adds a new formatting option to rspec that counts your ActiveRecord queries and object creations.

Why? Because database interaction is really slow, and careless creation of large graphs of objects is a primary cause of insanely slow test suites. This project can help you diagnose where you're doing the most damage so that you can start to fix it.

This library plays nicely with DatabaseCleaner.

Installation

Normal bundle stuff. You'll almost certainly need to add this gem to your bundle at least temporarily, since you'll be running rspec using bundler.

gem 'rspec-activerecord-formatter', require: false

Usage

The current answer is to change your .rspec initializer to include the following:

--require rspec-activerecord-formatter
--require rails_helper
--format ActiveRecordDocumentationFormatter

We have to include the rails_helper so that ActiveRecord is loaded prior to trying to load the formatter. That way, we can hook into AR creations.

You can also run the formatter as a one-off option to rspec:

rspec path/to/example_spec.rb --require rspec-activerecord-formatter --require rails_helper --format ActiveRecordDocumentationFormatter

Once you set the formatter, you should now see the number of objects created and total queries for each of your tests:

Tests with AR annotations.

You'll also get a summary at the end of your test run:

Test summary.

If you want less granularity, you can also use the progress formatter:

--require rspec-activerecord-formatter
--require rails_helper
--format ActiveRecordProgressFormatter

Next Steps

  • The method I was using to count AR objects doesn't work well with DatabaseCleaner when not explicitly wiring the library into before blocks. I'd like to be able to go back to a method other than scanning for INSERT INTO strings.
  • Configuration, especially formatting the output to optionally outdent the counts.
  • The current dependency versions are a vague guess. They can and should clearly be more lenient.
  • I dunno, tests.

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome. Fork, fix, submit pulls.

Contribution is expected to conform to the Contributor Covenant.

License

This software is released under the MIT License.