I use a couple of items for doing Behavior Driven Development. Primarily, Cucumber and RSpec. In conjunction with those, I use Factory Girl and Shoulda.

Sometimes, it seems that Factory Girl can get in the way of running rake db:migrate when you push your code up to your source control system, in my case GitHub, for others download and run it. Such was the case with the Jenkins CI server.

The Issue

The problem was that Factory Girl attempts to create factories for models that did not have database tables created yet. It was trying to run before the database migrations ran when the server tried running the rake db:migrate. (Note, yes, we always prepend bundle exec, but shortened it here for context.)

The Solution

It seems that you're not to load the factory_girl_rails gem in your Gemfile in the :development group at all. The configuration on the GitHub repo just says to add it to your Gemfile, but instead you should add it to your :test group only. For example: gem 'factory_girl_rails', :group => :test

More details can be found on the mailing list topic.