# Understanding specs and fixtures

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/understanding-specs-and-fixtures/175189
**Category:** Development
**Created:** [January 5, 2021, 6:14pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/understanding-specs-and-fixtures/175189 "2021-01-05T18:14:06Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![pfaffman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/pfaffman/32/120154_2.png) [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [January 5, 2021, 6:14pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/understanding-specs-and-fixtures/175189/1 "2021-01-05T18:14:06Z")

</div>

I’ve got a plugin that needs to seed some groups.

Following, [Add new webhooks and customize webhook payload](https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-to-add-new-webhooks-and-customize-webhook-payload/59609) , in `plugin.rb` I have

```
  SeedFu.fixture_paths << Rails.root.join("plugins", "discourse-pfaffmanager", "db", "fixtures").to_s

```

I have stuff like this in `db/fixtures/001_create_pfaffmanager_groups`

```ruby
Group.seed do |g|
  g.name = SiteSetting.pfaffmanager_ec2_pro_server_group
  g.visibility_level = Group.visibility_levels[:owners]
end

```

If I run a `./bin/rake db:migrate` it does what I expect, but when I run the specs I get

```
# ERROR: duplicate key value violates unique constraint "index_groups_on_name"

```

So it seems like the specs want to run and re-run these seeds? That doesn’t make sense, as if I re-run the migration, they don’t cause errors then.

Maybe I should move those specs into `spec/fixtures` and have the plugin create those groups on startup? Is that best practice? I think I like the idea of having those groups getting created on migration better than asserting them with `Group.find_or_create_by` on every plugin startup, but that’s working.

Also, `./bin/rake db:drop db:create db:migrate` seems to create the test database, but isn’t doing the migrations unless I do a `RAILS_DB=test ./bin/rake db:migrate` is that expected? I thought it would do those migrations.

Now I’m even more confused, even after the above migrate of the test db, I get

```plaintext
ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid:
  PG::UndefinedTable: ERROR: relation "groups" does not exist
  LINE 8: WHERE a.attrelid = '"groups"'::regclass

```

And I see stuff like this in from when I ran the migrate:

```
-- execute("UPDATE groups\nSET flair_icon = 'fab-youtube'\nWHERE flair_icon = 'youtube-play' OR flair_icon = 'fa-youtube-play'\n")

```

Well, I did a

```
./bin/rake db:test:prepare

```

and that fixed it, but I don’t remember having to do that before.