Missing test fixture or seed data

April 30, 2026 · View on GitHub

Playbook ID: missing-test-fixture Category: test Severity: high Tags: test, fixture, seed, database, missing-data

What this failure means

A test failed because it could not load a required fixture file, seed record, or test helper resource that was expected to exist before the test ran.

Common log signals

fixture not found
missing fixture
fixture file missing
no such file or directory
FileNotFoundError
FactoryBot
factory_bot
factory not registered

Diagnosis

A test failed because it could not load a required fixture file, seed record, or test helper resource that was expected to exist before the test ran.

Fix steps

  1. Run the database seed step before the test suite: rails db:seed, npm run db:seed, python manage.py loaddata, or the project equivalent.

  2. Check if the fixture file was recently renamed or deleted:

    git log --diff-filter=D --name-only --pretty=format: -- testdata/ fixtures/ | grep -v "^$" | head -20

  3. Verify the fixture path is committed and not gitignored:

    git ls-files testdata/
git ls-files fixtures/

  4. For factory errors: confirm the factory definition matches the current model schema. Run pending migrations before seeding: rails db:migrate, python manage.py migrate.

  5. Update the fixture file or factory definition to match the current data model, then re-run migrations and seeds before the test suite.

Validation

  • Run the seed step locally and confirm it exits 0.
  • Re-run the full test suite and confirm the fixture-not-found errors are gone.

Likely files to inspect

  • testdata/
  • fixtures/
  • .github/workflows/*.yml
  • migrations/

Run Faultline

faultline analyze build.log
faultline explain missing-test-fixture
faultline workflow build.log --json --mode agent

Search phrases this page answers

  • Missing test fixture or seed data
  • Test: missing test fixture or seed data
  • ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound
  • faultline explain missing-test-fixture

Generated from playbooks/bundled/log/test/missing-test-fixture.yaml. Do not edit directly — run make docs-generate.