Ephemeral test environments

Status: Available (Phase 4). Unity Catalog scratch schemas, JSON fixture seeding, TTL metadata/reaping, and the reusable workflow are implemented. Optional Lakebase branch provisioning remains a follow-on.

Shared, long-lived test workspaces rot: fixtures drift, grants accumulate, and tests start depending on state nobody remembers creating. The ephemeral tier gives every pull request its own scratch environment.

CLI

fx test env create --name pr-1234 --seed fixtures/ --ttl 24h
fx test env list
fx test env destroy --name pr-1234

create provisions:

• a Unity Catalog schema fx_pr_1234 (optionally its own catalog), with USE/SELECT/MODIFY granted only to the CI service principal;
• optionally a Lakebase branch for control-plane database tests;
• seeded fixture tables from --seed;
• an environment manifest recording everything created, so destroy is exact.

Environments carry a TTL; a scheduled reaper destroys anything past it, so a crashed CI run can never leak workspace state.

Reusable CI workflow

Any repository can consume the published workflow:

jobs:
  databricks-tests:
    uses: Fabric-Pro/fabric-experiments/.github/workflows/databricks-test.yml@main
    with:
      seed: fixtures/
      catalog: tf_databricks
      warehouse_id: 599af4d9378acba2
      test_command: pnpm test:features
    secrets:
      DATABRICKS_HOST: ${{ secrets.DATABRICKS_HOST }}
      DATABRICKS_CLIENT_ID: ${{ secrets.DATABRICKS_CLIENT_ID }}
      DATABRICKS_CLIENT_SECRET: ${{ secrets.DATABRICKS_CLIENT_SECRET }}

The workflow runs, in order:

1. local-profile BDD features and unit suites (no workspace needed — always on);
2. fx test env create for the PR;
3. live-profile BDD features and the live check suite inside that environment;
4. fx test env destroy, unconditionally (if: always()).

Scoping rules

• One environment per PR; scenario-scoped scratch schemas nest inside it.
• The CI principal's grants are confined to the PR schema — enforced by the governance scenarios in the BDD suite, so a grant misconfiguration is itself a test failure.
• Fixtures are committed files; an environment is fully reproducible from the repo at any commit.