Integration testing Search - Clash of the indices

ElasticSearch is an Open Source (Apache 2), Distributed, RESTful, Search Engine built on top of Apache Lucene. It promises to solve all the pain points of implementing search in a web application. Tire is one of the popular ruby clients for elasticsearch. Though it is important to have integration test for models while using tire in a ruby app, it is equally important to make sure that the test doesn't corrupt the development indices.

One approach to overcome this is to create a dummy class in the test that includes the Tire::Model::Search and Tire::Model::Callbacks module and use it to create indices and test search in the integration test. While this seems simple, there is a cleaner approach, that lets us use the actual models in test and does not corrupt the development indices as well. There is a configuration in tire that lets you provide the prefix to the index name. By specifying the

Tire::Model::Search.index_prefix Rails.env

in the initializers/tire.rb file, we can tell tire to use different indices for different environments. For example, the search in the dev mode will use "development_model_name" index and that in the test environment will use "test_model_name" index.