testing

[berlinger-mschwartz]

Hi everyone,

Hope you can help me out with something seemingly trivial.

I'm trying to configure a MySQL test database for my unit tests, because an in-memory SQLite database has proven to be too limited. I was hoping to use an .env.testing file for this.

Set-up:

• .env contains DB_DATABASE=my_database
• .env.testing is a copy of .env, but contains DB_DATABASE=my_database_test

Now if I run php artisan config:clear and php artisan config:cache --env=testing, the resulting config file bootstrap/cache/config.php contains my_database instead of my_database_test. The addition of the --env argument doesn't seem to matter.

What am I missing?

My current hypothesis is that our Docker set-up is somehow responsible for these problems. If I change DB_DATABASE in my .env and rerun the two config commands, the database is not updated until I recreate the container.

Any suggestions?

[jdecode]

The solution that I use (recommended solution, totally from personal experience, might differ from other popular answers).

Set DB URL in .env.example (and copy this file at the time of initial setup to .env) as :
DATABASE_URL="pgsql://postgres:docker@docker-db-service:5432/postgres"

Set DB URL in .env.testing as :
DATABASE_URL="pgsql://postgres:docker@docker-db-service:5432/test_db"

Set DB_CONNECTION=pgsql in docker-compose (since the connection does not need to change when switching from primary app to testing).

I have used pgsql, and the same principles apply to mysql as well.

Honestly, I am not sure if this is helpful, so feel free to let me know so that I can try to explain it better next time.