0028-testing.md

Testing

You are already set up with Laravel to test your application.

By default, tests are stored inside tests directory.

It contains two further ones:

• Unit - for testing small isolated parts of your code, like one class functionality or a single method
• Feature - as name suggests, testing features of your app, often through making HTTP requests to your running application

The configuration file phpunit.xml is already included.

Testing in a separate environment

Tests usually run in a separate environment. By environment I mean different set of settings for your application.

As you normally store your environment variables inside .env file for local development, you would configure this variables inside phpunit.xml file instead.

By default, Laravel runs tests in testing environment.

If your tests involve database, you would not like to perform any changes on your local database.

You might create a new MySQL database for testing, or use SQLite (an in-memory version of it).

To specify a different database connection for testing environment, add

<env name="DB_CONNECTION" value="sqlite_testing" />

Inside the phpunit.xml.

Then, configure the connection inside config/database.php file like below

'sqlite_testing' => [
    'driver' => 'sqlite',
    'database' => ':memory:'
],

The above example would define a new sqlite_testing connection, using SQLite. To create this database in memory, we use the special database property value :memory:

Important, before running your tests for the first time, run

php artisan config:clear

To clear configuration cache. Read more about configuration cache.

Running tests

To run tests

./vendor/bin/phpunit

Writing tests

All your tests will extend the base class TestCase from Tests namespace.

Here is an example Unit test

<?php

namespace Tests\Unit;

use Tests\TestCase;

class ExampleTest extends TestCase
{
    public function testBasicTest()
    {
        $this->assertTrue(true);
    }
}

All testing method names should start with test, eg. testHome, testContact, testPostStored etc.

A single test can be divided into three parts

• Arrange - test set up, like creating an object to be tested or mocks
• Act - execute the objects created in the Arrange step
• Assert - check and verify the result from the Act step against expected results

Database

To refresh database after each test (rebuild schema using migrations), add the Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\RefreshDatabase trait to your test class.

An example:

<?php

namespace Tests\Feature;

use App\BlogPost;
use Tests\TestCase;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\RefreshDatabase;

class PostTest extends TestCase
{
    use RefreshDatabase;

    public function testPostIndex()
    {
        $response = $this->get('/posts');

        $response->assertSeeText('No blog posts yet!');
    }
}

Testing using HTTP requests

You can call your application using HTTP

$response = $this->get('/posts');

Then, you can perform some assertions on the result, like checking if certain text was displayed or if JSON with specific values was returned.

$response->assertSeeText('First post');

Here is a list of all possible assertions