Unit and Integration Tests against a real database with Continuous Integration

A real project example using Github, Travis CI, Java/Spring, and PostgreSQL.

I’m going to explain a very simple free solution that I really use with my ambitious project called Gemini that automatically generate backend from scratch starting from a simple DSL model.

In Gemini I made a lot of opinionated actions to translate the abstract type I defined to real SQL statements and queries, sometimes using some database-specific features (such as domains in PostgreSQL).

I developed a lot of integration tests that use a real PostgreSQL database and each time a macro feature should be tested I completely erase the integration test database starting from a fresh one. I know this process may take some times to complete, but It is not important. I rarely run all the codebase tests while I’m programming. I run only sections that may be affected and Travis and will notice me if something goes wrong at all.

So let’s go in deep but I don’t want to explain how I start Spring context or erase the database here you could contact me or navigate through the if you need help with /Gradle/Java.

Instead, I want to explain how to set up and use a combination of Github and Travis to start the integration tests. In this way, if you don’t use or you can set up the continuous integration process replacing the language/commands with yours.

First of all you need to enable the Travis Webhook inside your Github repository settings (so you need a Travis account).

Then simply provide a suitable .travis.yml in the root of your project. The following is mine for Gemini.

It is really easy:

1. Define the language you are using. In my case java and openjdk 10
2. Then install the required tools for testing and the database inside the before_install section. I need gradle and postgreslq11
3. before_script is to initialize services. I create the database that I’m using in my integration tests to connect with
4. script is the section that starts the test flow. For example i clean all the gradle context and I run a gradle task jacocoRootReport that compile all and start tests for each submodulo of my Spring project

That’s all. Github and Travis will do the rest. Take a look for example at the result of a pull request Merge…

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