# Passing a DB connection between scripts **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [July 13, 2009, 6:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/passing-a-db-connection-between-scripts/172037 "2009-07-13T18:17:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![byrnejb](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/b/d2c977/32.png) [@byrnejb](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/byrnejb)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2009, 6:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/passing-a-db-connection-between-scripts/172037/1 "2009-07-13T18:17:19Z")
I am attempting to test a stand-alone script. I wish to call the script from inside the test framework, passing it a variety of command line arguments, and verify the results. The difficulty I have is that the testing framework I am using, cucumber, holds db updates inside an incomplete db transaction. It thereby avoids the processing cost of an actual commit while easily resetting the db for the next test by performing a rollback at the end of the present test. In this situation, opening a new instance of the script via the backtick kernel method creates a new db connection. Since this is a different connection from that opened by the test framework, incomplete transactions are invisible to it and so the script fails, because the test data is not available. What I would like to do is to execute the script inside the existing Ruby instance and inherit the DB connection. This I cannot figure out how to accomplish. I thought that simply "load"ing the script would suffice, but no. In this case it evidently neither opens its own connection nor inherits the existing one for I receive this error at the load statement. ``` PGError: not connected: ROLLBACK (ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid) /usr/lib64/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.3.2/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract_adapter.rb:212:in ``` `log’ Does anyone have any ideas on how I can accomplish what I desire?