@sodabrew Running these tests against a production-like environment is the point. They're designed to ensure the correct behavior in a *complete system*, not just to check a small block of code. We have tests like this across many of our projects, including puppet, facter, and hiera.

More importantly (to me, at least) is that these tasks are used by other Puppet Enterprise components, so ensuring they are functional in that deployment (which differs in several ways from a simple dashboard setup) is extremely important.

Rails has an unfortunate habit of conflating unit and integration tests, and while we can't escape that for certain types of tests that touch rails directly, we *can* avoid it here. These tests are best run against the full stack, and the best way to do that is to run them against a deployment.