Running Tests

Backend

To run backend tests, start and attach to the backend container as described in running-the-dev-environment.md. Once inside the container, execute make test or make test-parallel to run the tests.

The tests use the config.settings.tests configuration, which sets base variables and ignores environment variables in the .env file. The .env file is intended for production or development mode.

Customize Test Settings

You can customize test settings by creating a .env.testing file in the backend directory. For example:

# backend/.env.testing
BASEROW_MAX_FIELD_LIMIT=1

Migrations and database setup

By default, BASEROW_TESTS_SETUP_DB_FIXTURE is considered on in the config.settings.tests configuration. This means that the database will be set up without running the migrations, but only installing the database formulas needed for the tests. This is done to speed up the test setup process.

If you want to run the migrations, you can run BASEROW_TESTS_SETUP_DB_FIXTURE=off pytest to run them all. This is useful when you want to test the migrations and you don’t care about the speed of the test setup.

If you want to install the custom formula pgSQL functions only once and then reuse the database between tests, you can run BASEROW_TESTS_SETUP_DB_FIXTURE=off pytest --no-migrations --reuse-db.

You can even omit --no-migrations to apply any new migrations coming from the current branch to avoid recreating the database from scratch.

Running Tests Outside the Backend Container

To run tests outside the backend container, follow these steps:

  1. Create a Python virtual environment. See supported to determine the supported version of Python.
  2. From the backend directory, install the required packages with pip install requirements/base.txt and pip install requirements/dev.txt.
  3. Set environment variables to connect to the database. Create a .env.testing-local file in the backend directory. At a minimum, set DATABASE_HOST to localhost since the default value of db is only valid inside the docker network.
# backend/.env.testing-local
DATABASE_HOST=localhost
  1. Export the TEST_ENV_FILE variable to specify the environment file:
export TEST_ENV_FILE='.env.testing-local'
  1. Run make test or make test-parallel from your shell outside the containers in the backend directory.