Unit testing and running the server locally

Setup

postgresql

The simplest way to get this going on a mac is to install the postgres app

.env

TODO: switch to SC_ENV files

You'll notice a set files with the .env prefix. The .env file contains environment variables that apply to all users across all environments. To add an environment variable specific to your local setup, add the variable to .env.NODE_ENV.local where NODE_ENV can be test, development, etc.

Example local env file

TODO: switch to SC_ENV files

If you have NODE_ENV=development, you'd have a local file named .env.development.local with similar content to the following:

SERVER_DB_HOST=localhost
# assuming your postgres instance is open on port 5432
SERVER_DB_PORT=5432

Testing

For any environment variables specific to local setup, such as postgres host or port, do not modify .env files checked into the repository. Instead, add the variables to .env.test.local (or to other local .env files). Specifically, you might want to override SERVER_DB_USER, SERVER_DB_HOST and SERVER_DB_PORT.

echo "SERVER_DB_USER=postgres" > .env.test.local # you probably need to do at least this (if you're on a mac)
yarn install
NODE_ENV=test yarn db:create
NODE_ENV=test yarn db:migrate
yarn test:ci

Note on POSTGRES_USER

On CircleCI we use POSTGRES_USER as root, as set in the CircleCI configuration file in the monorepo root. Since NODE_ENV is set to test in that environment, .env.test is used, which points to root as SERVER_DB_USER. When testing locally, however, we expect that NODE_ENV is development, so .env.development is used, which uses postgres for SERVER_DB_USER. We could unite these two by syncronizing CircleCI and our local environments to both use postgres as the user.