We’re using Globalize for our latest Rails project and I just ran against a problem when running specs with rake.

We specify the base language and the locales our app supports in environment.rb:

include Globalize
Locale.set_base_language('en-US')
SupportedLocales.define(['fi-FI', 'sv-SE', 'en-US'], 'en-US')

However, SupportedLocales.define expects that the language and country data exists in the database, otherwise it will die miserably. Of course, when you run specs with rake, it will wipe the database as its first action so you’re pretty much out of luck:

.../vendor/plugins/globalize/lib/globalize/localization/supported_locales.rb:282:in `setup': Globalize base language undefined! (RuntimeError)

I fixed this by copying the db:test:clone rake task from [RAILS]/railties/lib/tasks/databases.rake to its own file in lib/tasks and modifying it so that it will load some language and country fixtures automatically:

require(File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'vendor', 'rails', 'activerecord', 'lib', 'active_record', 'fixtures'))

namespace :db do
  namespace :test do
    desc "Recreate the test database from the current environment's database schema"
    task :clone => %w(db:schema:dump db:test:purge) do
      ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(ActiveRecord::Base.configurations['test'])
      ActiveRecord::Schema.verbose = false
      Rake::Task["db:schema:load"].invoke
      Fixtures.create_fixtures("#{RAILS_ROOT}/spec/fixtures", [:globalize_countries, :globalize_languages])
    end
  end
end

The only thing differing from the original task is the last line creating the fixtures. For some reasons I also need to explicitly require the fixtures file on the top of the file. Aside from this, I needed to change Rakefile in the root of our Rails app to require config/environment.rb instead of config/boot.rb for everything to work.

Of course your fixture files need to include all the languages and countries you’re specifying in your SupportedLocales.define call.

After these modifications, rake runs through fine again.