When testing Ruby on Rails, every so often you’ll find that rake fails in testing while running a test directly succeeds. How frustrating!

The crux of the problem is typically a missing fixture in the test class. What happens is that the data from your missing fixture is loaded in the test database, masking the problem when running a test individually. Since the order of operations on a rake test is clearly different than running a test singularly, there is a good chance that the data your test depends on simply is not loaded during the rake process. Unless you add that missing fixture, of course.

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