Randy Girard

Faster Rails Tests

Anyone that has worked on a large rails application knows how long it takes for tests to run. I have this same problem as well. I use the build in testing framework packaged with Rails. One thing I noticed was that the Rails environment seemed to be loading between running unit, functional and integration tests. I felt this was unnecessary if I wanted to run the whole test suite, say for CI purposes, so I created a custom rake task that I use:

# lib/tasks/test.rake
require "rake/testtask"

Rake::TestTask.new do |t|
  t.libs << "lib"
  t.libs << "test"
  t.name = "test:ci"
  t.warning = false
  t.verbose = false
  t.test_files = FileList[
    "test/unit/**/*_test.rb",
    "test/functional/**/*_test.rb",
    "test/integration/**/*_test.rb"
  ]
end

This allows me to run all my tests in a single application boot and shave a small amount of time off the full run:

bundle exec rake test:ci