Rspec, Cucumber: best speed database clean strategy

1., 2. & 4., You should use transactions (either with use_transactional_fixtures or transactions support from the database_cleaner gem) if you are using capybara's default engine, rack_test. As you noted, using transactions are substantially faster than using a truncation strategy. However, when database writes can go through different threads (as with selenium) transactions won't work. So you'll need to use truncation (or force everything to go through one db thread--another option).

3. Yes, you should turn off use_transactional_fixtures when using the database_cleaner gem since the gem natively support transactions. If you only need transactions then just use_transactional_fixtures and never load the database_cleaner gem.

5. The following code will switch between :transaction and :truncation on the fly. (Tested this with rspec, capybara, rails3.)

Features This should give you the best of both worlds. The speed of rack_test when you don't need to test javascript stuff and the flexibility of selenium when you do.

Also this code takes care of repopulating seed data in cases where it is needed (this method assumes you use seeds.rb to load your seed data--as is the current convention).

Add the following code to spec_helper.

config.use_transactional_fixtures = false
RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.before(:suite) do
    require "#{Rails.root}/db/seeds.rb"
  end

  config.before :each do
    if Capybara.current_driver == :rack_test
      DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :transaction
    else
      DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
    end
    DatabaseCleaner.start
  end
  config.after(:each) do
    if Capybara.current_driver == :rack_test
      DatabaseCleaner.clean
    else
      DatabaseCleaner.clean
      load "#{Rails.root}/db/seeds.rb"