The parallel test gem is relatively simple gem to install, that said, it took me a while to get it to work properly, here's how you do it n 6 easy steps.
1. Add the gem to the test section of the gemfile
2. Now we need to change the database.yml file in order for the gem to create the databases you need (the gem will create as many databases as the number of cores on your processor). Edit the test section of your database.yml file to look like this:
3. Next we need to setup the gem’s rake taks. To do this, add the following line to the rakefile:
That’s it! We are done with the parallel_test gem setup. In order to run parallel tests we need to prepare the database.
4. To do that we run the following command:
rake parallel:create
5. Next we need to prepare the test databases with the database schema. Before we do that, we need to run any migrations that have not been applied to the test database to do this run:
rake RAILS_ENV=test db:migrate
rake parallel:prepare
6. Last, we need to configure sphinx! Paste the following code in your test section in the sphinx .yml file
That's it!! To run the tests use the following commands
rake parallel:features # Cucumber
These commands do not work as one would expect though, so I added a rake task to make things a little bit easier. If you want to use the parallel test gem just use:
rake thredup:faster_cucumber