HOWTO-run_tests.md

How to run the test suite

There are current two ways to run tests, using either PostgreSQL or SQLite.

PostgreSQL Testing (default, closer to most prod environments)

Running Postgres with Docker (recommended)

1. Install Docker
2. Run redis and postgres using docker-compose: docker-compose up
3. Create the test database: ./dev-tools/create-test-database
4. Run yarn test

Installing Postgres locally

1. Install PostgreSQL - Tips to installing Postgres
2. In PostgreSQL, create a database and user named "spoke_test":

CREATE DATABASE spoke_test;
CREATE USER spoke_test WITH PASSWORD 'spoke_test';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE spoke_test TO spoke_test;

3. Run yarn test

SQLite Testing (simpler)

1. Run yarn run test-sqlite

Test Redis Cache

Redis is used for caching and is separate from the backend DB so can be used with sqlite or postgres. Redis cache testing defaults to postgres and functions like an 'addon' to the DB for improved speed/scalability.

1. Run yarn test-rediscache

Integration Testing

The integration test suite automates real world user scenarios to verify that Spoke behaves as intended. The integration testing suite uses Cypress to drive a web browser to test user experience scenarios. It runs a separate test instance of Spoke, configured separately from the config in your .env, using the spoke_test PostgreSQL database, and running at http://localhost:3001.

To run the integration test suite in development:

1. Set up PostgreSQL as described above
2. Start test instance of Spoke with yarn start:test
3. Run integration test suite interactively with yarn test-cypress

The integration suite runs in CI using a Github Actions workflow defined in .github/workflows/cypress-tests.yaml.

When developing new features for Spoke, please consider writing a Cypress tests. The test server will hot reload your code changes so that you can test drive your feature development.