So, you have database changes—either schema or data changes—that need to be implemented and rolled out across various environments. One approach could be to connect directly to each database server and execute scripts. However, you might not—and indeed, probably should not—have direct read/write access to certain environments like beta or production. Additionally, consider if a client posed the following questions; would you be able to easily respond? What is the state of the database in our Production environment?

Run tests locally In order to test, you can spin up the docker containers locally. There are multiple things that you need to do to avoid confusion during testing. The code that is tested, gets copied over to a docker image. This means that when you make a change, you need to take care of things such as: stop running containers remove containers remove volumes that have stale data remove images for UI and backend API remove dangling images spin up new services with docker compose copy tests results into specific directory After doing this a couple of times (and forgetting to do them) it was time for automation.

The end-to-end tests set-up described in my previous post, is a series of docker containers that talk to each other. This set up is nice because, it will run on any machine. This allows you to test your app locally or in CI/CD pipeline. In this short post, I show the set up I used to run end-to-end tests. Docker compose set up In order to spin up containers locally or do so in the CI pipeline, and to run just the “smoke tests” or for all tests, I created multiple docker compose files.

In this post, I will provide a thousand-foot overview of how to run end-to-end tests in your CI/CD pipeline. In future posts, I plan to write up the details, challenges encountered, and solutions. I will show how the end-to-end tests were set up in the CI/CD pipeline. End-to-end tests verify the entire application, including the front-end, back-end APIs, and the database. These components had to be up and running in the build agent and play nicely with each other.