Tip: Speed up your tests with MySQL in-memory

Byte size tip

It's very common in the Laravel community to use SQLite in-memory for phpunit tests. However, sometimes you may need functionality that differ between MySQL and SQLite. Not writing test for that or struggling to find a compatible SQL operation for the two databases are options that I consider less than ideal.

We can instruct Docker to mount a file system that will only be persisted on memory

  database:
    image: mysql:5.7
    ports:
    - "3306:3306"
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD={your_password_here}
      - MYSQL_DATABASE={your_default_database}
    command: mysqld --sql_mode="NO_ZERO_IN_DATE,NO_ZERO_DATE,ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION"
    tmpfs:
      - /var/lib/mysql:rw

Setting up /var/lib/mysql as a read-write temporary file system will instruct docker to skip the local storage and only mount the volume in memory, speeding up it's storage manipulation.

As always, hit me up on Twitter with any questions.

Cheers.