This is bellmyer-hydra, a small fork of the main hydra gem. The only external difference is that each worker launched by hydra sets the HYDRA_WORKER_ID environment variable.

This allows truly multi-threaded operations because you can then give each worker its own database. For example, in your rails app’s database.yml you can do this:

test:
  adapter: mysql
  database: app_test<%= ENV['HYDRA_WORKER_ID'] %>

And each hydra worker will use its own personal copy of the test database. The naming convention for testing with 4 workers would then be:

• app_test

• app_test2

• app_test3

• app_test4

Setting up and syncing these databases is up to the user. You may want to try using Sauron, my automated, multi-threaded testing toolkit. Think multi-threaded, multi-database autotest. In fact, that’s why I created this fork of hydra in the first place:

github.com/bellmyer/sauron rubygems.org/gems/sauron

Spread your tests over processors and/or multiple machines to test your code faster.

Hydra is a distributed testing framework. It allows you to distribute your tests locally across multiple cores and processors, as well as run your tests remotely over SSH.

Hydra’s goals are to make distributed testing easy. So as long as you can ssh into a computer and run the tests, you can automate the distribution with Hydra.

Check out the wiki for usage and configuration information:

wiki.github.com/ngauthier/hydra/

I’ve tried hard to keep accurate documentation via RDoc as well:

rdoc.info/projects/ngauthier/hydra

Right now hydra only supports a few frameworks:

• Test::Unit

• Cucumber

• RSpec

We’re working on adding more frameworks, and if you’d like to help, please send me a message and I’ll show you where to code!

Copyright © 2010 Nick Gauthier. See LICENSE for details.