Testing

There are a number of options for testing persistent actors when using the Pekko Persistence Cassandra plugin. The two main methods are:

• Testing using the inmem journal as shown in the Pekko docs.
• Testing against a real Cassandra instance.

For testing against Cassandra you can:

• Use an existing cluster in your environment.
• Install a local Cassandra cluster installed with your preferred method
• Set up one locally with Cassandra Cluster Manager

Then there are options with tighter unit test framework integration:

• Cassandra unit
• Test Containers

For testing, it can be convenient to enable automatic creation of keyspace and tables with configuration:

pekko.persistence.cassandra {
  journal.keyspace-autocreate = on
  journal.tables-autocreate = on
  snapshot.keyspace-autocreate = on
  snapshot.tables-autocreate = on
}

Another recommended configuration is to not run test in parallel to avoid contention around manipulating the cassandra keyspace. Using sbt, you are able to control the parallelExecution as described here.