Rails 2.2, postgres, and testing

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If you’re using Postgresql with Rails 2.2, your testing database user needs to be a “superuser” for your tests to run. This is not a good thing. It’s the equivalent of running as root. But, if you’ve got a completely separate development/testing server it’s better than not being able to test at all.

If your postgres testing user isn’t a superuser, you’ll get errors like:

ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid: PGError: ERROR:  permission \
denied: "RI_ConstraintTrigger_17866" is a system trigger

You can create a postgres superuser thusly:

> su - postgres
> psql template1
> template1=# create user  your username superuser;

Update the testing stanza of your config/database.yml and you should be good to go.

3 thoughts on “Rails 2.2, postgres, and testing”

  1. You could otherwise change the configuration of your test environment in database.yml to:

    test:
    adapter: postgresql
    database: myapp_test
    username: postgres

  2. Sure. The real problem isn’t getting it to work, it’s that Rails 2.2 testing seems to need a superuser connection – meaning bad SQL could destroy your entire postgres install. Not good.

  3. I was doing alright with tests in Rails 2.2.2 and a non-superuser in my Postgres DB, until I added the migration_helpers plugin and created some foreign key constraints. Thanks for the post; it got me up and running again quickly!

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