You can mock database calls all day long, but when your code hits production, the real database doesn’t lie. Unique constraints fail, transactions don’t roll back as they should, and subtle behaviors that mocks can’t reproduce, causing bad code to go into production.

Running integration tests against a real database should catch these issues, but in practice, this is painful: managing containers, seeding and resetting test data, applying migrations, cleaning up resources… Neon already gives you instant, isolated database branches, making the process of realistic database copies way more straightforward. To make integration tests with branching even more simple, I built a project for myself called Neon Testing – it worked so well that I decided to open source it.

What is Neon Testing?

Neon Testing is an open-source utility for Vitest that automates the lifecycle of Neon branches for database integration tests. It turns branches into disposable test environments: each test file runs against its own clean Postgres branch with your production schema and constraints intact.

Instead of wiring up your own branch creation, teardown, and connection logic, you can drop Neon Testing into your Vitest setup and let it provision a fresh branch for every test file and clean it up when the file finishes.Each test file is fully isolated (Vitest runs them in parallel), while tests inside a file share the same branch. If you need per-test isolation, you can reset the database in a beforeEach hook.

Getting started

Let’s walk through a simple example. Here’s a basic user creation function that relies on a unique index to prevent multiple users with the same email address.

If your users table has a unique constraint on email, calling this function twice with the same email should fail the second time. That’s exactly the kind of behavior you can’t mock, and a stale test database without the constraint would give you a false positive.

Let’s test this behavior with Neon Testing.

Step 1: Set up

Install the packages:

Configure Vitest to ensure tests use isolated databases. The neonTesting plugin clears any existing DATABASE_URL environment variable, preventing tests from accidentally using your local or production database instead of the isolated test branches:

Create a small setup module that you’ll reuse across all your test files:

Step 2: Write tests that verify real database behavior

Now you can test the actual constraint behavior against your real production schema (with or without production data, or even with anonymized production data). Each test file automatically gets its own fresh database clone on each run, so tests are completely isolated.

Step 3: Run your tests

Start Vitest in watch mode and see your tests run as you edit:

That’s it, your tests now run against the same database constraints and behaviors as production.

Wrapping up

Integration testing usually fails teams, not because the tests are hard to write, but because the infrastructure is hard to stand up and maintain. By combining Neon’s branching and the Neon Testing library, that pain is gone.

Give it a try – you can find it on npm and GitHub.