Rspec Using Development Database

The reason your tests hit the development database is because you have defined ENV['DATABASE_URL'] somewhere in your environment.

There are two ways of specifying the database connection to be used:

1. Specifying the ENV['DATABASE_URL']
2. Using the very popular database.yml file

In many cases the first one takes prescedence over the latter.

I realized I had a problem similar to yous after using ENV['DATABASE_URL'] to set my production database, only to find out that all my environments (test & development) suddenly had started to use my production database regardless of content in database.yml.

To solve my problem all I did was change the name on the environment variable to something else, so that it no longer overwrite my database.yml configurations.

Reading this will solve your problem: Connection Preference information

It sounds as though somewhere in your environment (maybe one of your gems) it is setting your environment to dev or establishing a connection to your dev database.

To explicitly make it connect to the test database, add:

ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection

to your rails_helper.

Prime candidate for troublemaker would be `gem 'rails-erd', '~> 1.4.1'. If you have this as auto-generating the diagram on migrate, when the test schema is migrated, it will connect to the dev database to dump a diagram.

Try removing this gem or perhaps the '.rake' file and see what happens.

Your rails_helper looks strange. The first line says:

Rails.env = 'test'

At the first line you don't have Rails loaded yet (I suppose you run RSpec using bundle exec rspec). So it should raise an error.

Therefore I made a small change in rails_helper:

require File.expand_path('../../config/environment', __FILE__)Rails.env = 'test'require 'spec_helper'require 'rspec/rails'Dir[Rails.root.join('spec/support/**/*.rb')].each { |f| require f }# the rest

Now putting

expect(ActiveRecord::Base.connection_config[:database]).to match(/test/)

somewhere in your spec, should pass successfully.