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Offshore: Rails Remote Factories

March 16, 2014

Last year at TaskRabbit, we decided to go headlong into this Service Oriented Architecture thing. We ended up with several Rails and other Ruby apps that loosely depended on each other to work. While this was mostly good from a separation of concerns and organizational perspective, we found effective automated testing to be quite difficult.

Specifically, we have one core platform application whose API is the most used. We also allow other apps to have read-only access to its database. Several of the apps are more or less a client to that server. So while the satellite apps have their own test suite, the integration tests can only be correct if they are exercising the core API.

To handle this use case, we created a gem called Offshore. A normal test suite has factories and/or fixture data and it uses database transactions to reset the data for every test. Offshore brings this the SOA world by providing the ability to use another application’s factories from your test suite as well as handling the rollback between tests. Through the actual exercising of the other application as well as a simplified usage pattern, we found that we trusted our integration tests much more that alternative approaches.

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