A bare-bones spec helper for testing Active Record classes without the rest of Rails.

active_record_helper.rb

# Note that this *will not load your Rails configuration* which means things like
# mass assignment protection by default, etc. will not be set.
require "active_record"

ActiveRecord::Base.configurations = YAML.load_file(File.expand_path("../../config/database.yml", __FILE__))
ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection("test")

# Stick your ActiveRecord junk (i.e. extensions) here

require "database_cleaner"
require "rspec/rails/extensions"

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.before(:suite) do
    DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :transaction
    DatabaseCleaner.clean_with(:truncation)
  end

  config.before(:each) do
    DatabaseCleaner.start
  end

  config.after(:each) do
    DatabaseCleaner.clean
  end
end