"Web Console is activated in the test environment. This is usually a mistake."

[ndbroadbent]

I was previously just using rspec to run my tests, but I've just switched to parallel_tests, and now I'm running into this error when I'm calling the rake task:

$ rake parallel:spec
Web Console is activated in the test environment. This is
usually a mistake. To ensure it's only activated in development
mode, move it to the development group of your Gemfile:

    gem 'web-console', group: :development

If you still want to run it in the test environment (and know
what you are doing), put this in your Rails application
configuration:

    config.web_console.development_only = false

My Gemfile does have the web-console gem in the development group, but I think the initial rake command assumes that the Rails env is development so it loads all of the gems in this group.

There's a few ways I can fix this:

• Run the parallel_rspec command directly
• Run RAILS_ENV=test rake parallel:spec
  • Maybe I could shorten this by setting up an alias for my bash profile.
• Set config.web_console.development_only = false in my application config

I think I'll just use the parallel_rspec command, but I was wondering how people normally resolve this issue? (And maybe something could be added to the README? I'm just not sure about the best solution.)

[ndbroadbent]

Oh I just ran into another issue with Spring. I've patched Spring, I saw the comments in this issue, but it sounds like the only way to run parallel tests with Spring is by running spring rake parallel:spec.

I attempted to fork spring-commands-rspec and create a spring-commands-parallel-rspec gem that adds a parallel_rspec command to Spring (and also includes the Spring patch automatically):

$ spring --help
Version: 2.1.0

Usage: spring COMMAND [ARGS]

Commands for Spring itself:

  binstub         Generate Spring based binstubs. Use --all to generate a binstub for all known commands. Use --remove to revert.
  help            Print available commands.
  server          Explicitly start a Spring server in the foreground
  status          Show current status.
  stop            Stop all Spring processes for this project.

Commands for your application:

  parallel_rspec  Runs the parallel_rspec command
  rails           Run a rails command. The following sub commands will use Spring: console, runner, generate, destroy, test.
  rake            Runs the rake command
  rspec           Runs the rspec command

So this is working without crashing and the tests pass, but it doesn't seem to provide any performance benefit. I think it's loading parallel_rspec inside the preloaded Rails environment, but then parallel_rspec starts it's own nested Rails environments outside of Spring.

I also tried to "springify" the parallel_spec executable, but that has the same issue:

$ bundle exec spring binstub --all

And actually I just tried running spring rake parallel:spec, and I think this also has the same problem. The rake commands starts a bit faster, but the RSpec tests aren't actually using the preloaded Rails environment.

EDIT

This is also happening for the 'helper' rake tasks. I added puts '=> Loading Rails application...' to the top of my config/application.rb, and I'm seeing:

$ rake parallel:create
Running via Spring preloader in process 45252
=> Loading Rails application...
=> Loading Rails application...
=> Loading Rails application...
=> Loading Rails application...
etc...

Also a similar RAILS_ENV issue to the one I mentioned above, because when I run parallel:drop or parallel:create, it is also dropping/creating my development database. I have to prefix the rake commands with RAILS_ENV=test so that it doesn't touch my development database.

EDIT 2

OHHHHHHH I just saw #468 and #469, and I didn't realize that Spring was disabled by default unless I explicitly set DISABLE_SPRING=0. I will send a PR to update the README and make this clearer.

EDIT 3

Awesome, I saw that the code in my spring-commands-parallel-rspec gem actually runs first, so I'm able to call ENV['DISABLE_SPRING'] ||= '0' earlier to force-enable Spring whenever someone intentionally adds the spring-commands-parallel-rspec gem to their Gemfile. So that fixes everything for Spring!

EDIT 4

I realized that I could support all of the commands from parallel_tests (not just rspec), so I've renamed the gem to spring-commands-parallel-tests. Have also opened a PR to add it to the rails/spring README.