Rails MYSQL migrations failing only on TEST?

Question

I can't for the life of me figure out what's going on here, im not SUPER familiar with rails however:

I've modified my database.yml file to point to a new mysql test database instead of sqlite. When doing a RAILS_ENV=test db:drop db:create db:seed on dev it works fine.

HOWEVER it always fails on test, citing a table doesn't exist when being altered by one of the migrations. I tried the exact same .sql file loaded up on the database for dev as on the test db with no errors.

I was able to delete the test db and duplicate the dev database and it would work fine, but for some reason...with migrations it will not work on the test database (which is a freshly created database, but so is the dev technically since I drop and recreate it from scratch with a seed file everytime)

What could cause such a thing? Migrations working fine on a fresh DEV database (Mysql2) and not on a fresh TEST database (Also Mysql2)

for specifics the error is complaining about a table not being able to be altered, because it doesn't exist. (I confirm in SQL Pro that the table doesn't exist as well), but when migrations run on Dev database it works fine (even after being deleted and commands above (but just ran in RAILS_ENV=development) ran.

Answer 1

When you run db:create all it does is create a completely empty database, with no tables... you need to run either db:migrate or db:test:prepare in order for the actual tables (empty of data) to be added to the test database.

So your usual run should be: db:drop db:create db:migrate db:seed

HOWEVER... db:seed isn't going to work the way you want it to... every test completely empties the database of data every time (this is to prevent cross-contamination of test data), and db:seed is to add data to your development environment.

In the test environment you need to duplicate any seed-data into fixtures instead (or use appropriate factories).