DB testing in Rust
2019-02-19

Writing integration tests for databases is often a cryptic art. The challenge stems from the fact that a database is stateful and instead we would like our tests to be reproducible. In this post I will share my experience writing database tests in Rust, some limitations of my current setup and thoughts on future improvements.

Note: As I continue to make progress on this, things might have changed and or improved :) Please have a peek at the code for the latest and greatest: https://github.com/toidiu/fin-public

Motivation

The real benefit of strongly typed languages is that they give us the freedom to evolve our code at high mobility. This might seem trivial but has compounding effects over the lifetime of a codebase. However this guarantee breaks down at the edges, specifically at the database and routing edge for a webservice. So when faced with a Postgres schema migration, for a project I have been working on, Fin, I set out to write some integration tests and migrate with confidence.

The solution is heavily inspired from this (post)[https://medium.com/@ericdreichert/test-setup-and-teardown-in-rust-without-a-framework-ba32d97aa5ab].

Goal

The task we have at hand is to create a Fixture that does the following:

Application Setup

To help manage SQL schemas and migration for Fin, I use diesel cli. It is an awesome little tool that I manage along side the application. I can write up.sql and down.sql scripts per change and run, revert or list them.

For reference, the following is a susccient folder structure for Fin:

▾ fin/
  ▾ src/
      main.rs
    Cargo.lock
    Cargo.toml
▾ migrations/
  ▸ 00000000000000_diesel_initial_setup/
  ▾ 2018-10-07-022941_init/
      down.sql
      up.sql
  ▸ 2018-10-07-232226_fake_data/

Solution


use chrono::prelude::*;
use postgres::{Connection, TlsMode};
use r2d2_postgres::{PostgresConnectionManager, TlsMode as R2TlsMode};
use std::env;
use std::fs;
use std::io::prelude::*;

const TEST_DB: &'static str = "fin_unit_test";
const CLUSTER_URI: &'static str = "postgres://postgres@localhost:5432";

lazy_static! {
    static ref DB_URI: String = format!("{}/{}", CLUSTER_URI, TEST_DB);
}

fn run_test<T>(test: T) -> ()
where
    T: FnOnce(&str) -> () + std::panic::UnwindSafe,
{
    let db_name = "make this unique per test"; // <- not currently used
    teardown();
    setup();
    let result = std::panic::catch_unwind(|| test(&db_name));
    assert!(result.is_ok())
}

setup() {
    // initialize a logger so we can see nice error messages during testing
    pretty_env_logger::try_init();

    // create the database
    let db_conn = Connection::connect(CLUSTER_URI, TlsMode::None)
        .expect("unable to create db conn");
    db_conn
        .execute(
            &format!(
                "CREATE DATABASE {name};",
                name = &TEST_DB.clone()
            ),
            &[],
        )
        .expect("unable to create db");

    // apply schema and add fake data
    let c_str = format!("{}/{}", CLUSTER_URI, TEST_DB);
    let conn = Connection::connect(DB_URI.as_str(), TlsMode::None).unwrap();
    let init =
        fs::read_to_string("../migrations/2018-10-07-022941_init/up.sql")
            .expect("file not found");
    let fake_data = fs::read_to_string(
        "../migrations/2018-10-07-232226_fake_data/up.sql",
    )
    .expect("file not found");

    conn.batch_execute(&init).unwrap();
    conn.batch_execute(&fake_data).unwrap();
}

fn teardown() {
    let db_conn = Connection::connect(CLUSTER_URI, TlsMode::None)
        .expect("unable to delete db conn");

    db_conn
        .execute(&format!("DROP database {};", &TEST_DB), &[])
        .expect("unable to delete db");
}

And then to use it in our tests:

#[test]
fn test_get_user() {
    run_test(|db_name| {
        let db = get_db();
        let res = db.get_user("[email protected]");
        assert_eq!(res.is_ok(), true);
        assert_eq!(res.unwrap().email, "[email protected]");
    })
}

Limitations

Closing thoughts