Rails, Travis-CI, and Factory Girl

I spent the better part of tonight trying to debug getting Travis-CI set up on a repository I’m working on, so I thought I’d write up what the problem was, and hopefully that may eventually help someone else not go through the same headaches.

This gist was the original error I was trying to debug. See line 503 of log.txt for the postgres error.

Before I begin explaining the problem, the fix is to change the Gemfile:

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# Gemfile (original)
gem 'factory_girl_rails'

# Gemfile (fix)
gem 'factory_girl_rails', require: false

The Problem

Without the require: false, FactoryGirl gets loaded when the rake environment task is run. Without any schema loaded in the database (which is true on every Travis run), there are no relations defined until rake db:migrate completes. However, rake db:migrate depends on rake environment.

This means, when we do rake db:migrate, FactoryGirl gets loaded, and tries to figure out all of the factory definitions, which don’t exist until rake db:migrate completes. Whoops.

The Fix

First, change your Gemfile to not require FactoryGirl by default, as noted above. Then, in your rails_helper.rb, and also env.rb (for cucumber):

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require 'factory_girl_rails'

This delays the loading of FactoryGirl until your specs/tests/features are run, so your database migrations can run correctly and without error on the Travis server.