RSpec + database cleaner, not cleaning correctly

Question

i really can't understand why DatabaseCleaner is not cleaning my test database. This is what i get prompting

1.9.2p290 :007 > DatabaseCleaner.clean

--

=> [#<DatabaseCleaner::Base:0x007fa7e4dd8b58 @autodetected=true, @orm=:active_record, @strategy=#<DatabaseCleaner::ActiveRecord::Transaction:0x007fa7e4dc14f8 @db=:default>>] 

This seems not to set correctly the database (supposed to be :test), so i got a solution like

 DatabaseCleaner[:active_record, :connection => :test].clean
 # => nil

The gem seems to be set up correctly:

1.9.2p290 :007 > DatabaseCleaner[:active_record, :connection => :test]

#<DatabaseCleaner::Base:0x007fe8fcfd4868 @orm=:active_record, @strategy=#<DatabaseCleaner::ActiveRecord::Transaction:0x007fe8fcfd2748 @db=:test, @connection_hash={"adapter"=>"sqlite3", "database"=>"db/test.sqlite3", "pool"=>5, "timeout"=>5000}>, @db=:test> 

This seems to setup correctly the test database, however it is still not going to clean properly the database. Any suggestions?

Thank you very much.

Answer 1

Even with database cleaner correctly configured it is easy to leave data lying around.

config.before(:suite) do
  DatabaseCleaner.clean_with :truncation  # clean DB of any leftover data
  DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :transaction # rollback transactions between each test
  Rails.application.load_seed # (optional) seed DB
end

config.before(:each) do
  DatabaseCleaner.start
end

config.after(:each) do
  DatabaseCleaner.clean
end

The configuration above starts & runs the cleaner either side of each test.

If you then use before :all in your specs you can end up with data lying around:

describe User do
  # Before all is outside the before :each 
  before :all do
    @user = User.create(:email => '[email protected]')
  end

  ...tests here
end

Answer 2

Here's my spec_helper.rb (slightly modified) - maybe that will help you?

ENV["RAILS_ENV"] ||= 'test'
require File.expand_path("../../config/environment", __FILE__)
require 'rspec/rails'
require 'database_cleaner'

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.before(:suite) do
    DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
  end
  config.before(:each) do
    DatabaseCleaner.start
  end
  config.after(:each) do
    DatabaseCleaner.clean
  end
end

Answer 3

Avdi Grimm's had a nice post recently on configuring database cleaner:

http://devblog.avdi.org/2012/08/31/configuring-database_cleaner-with-rails-rspec-capybara-and-selenium/

Answer 4

$ rails c test
> require 'database_cleaner'
> DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
> DatabaseCleaner.clean

https://github.com/DatabaseCleaner/database_cleaner