Suggestion: Restart TestRPC (optionally) after/before tests

[XertroV]

• I've asked for help in the Truffle Gitter before filing this issue.

Issue

This is a suggestion, and I'm posting this for the purpose of discussion.

In an effort to make truffle as resilient, deterministic, and newb friendly as possible, I'd suggest optionally restarting/starting testrpc after or before tests.

The justification for this is a non-deterministic issue that can arise from repeat testing:

When running a test suite that accidentally throws or otherwise expends the balance of an account, running that test again (once corrected to avoid throwing) results in trying to use an account with zero balance. The test fails with the following error:

Error: Error: sender doesn't have enough funds to send tx. The upfront cost is: 471238800000000000 and the senders account only has: 0

Steps to Reproduce

• Run a test that throws (due to bad parameters)
• Run the test again without those bad params.
• Test fails.

Expected Behavior

It would be nice if the 'snapshotting' feature of testrpc extended to accounts.

Actual Results

Test fails.

Environment

• Operating System: macos 10.12
• Truffle version: v3.3.2
• Ethereum client: testrpc
• node version: 6.9.2
• npm version: 3.10.9

Addendum

Can provide more details or an example if necessary.

[tcoulter]

Thanks for the issue! We'll be tracking this in issue #490. Let us know if you have any feedback.

[XertroV]

Sounds good, thanks for the update.