Laravel: Up and Running

Chapter 12. Testing

Most developers know that testing your code is A Good Thing. We’re supposed to do it. We likely have an idea of why it’s good, and we might’ve even read some tutorials about how it’s supposed to work.

But the gap between knowing why you should test and knowing how to test is wide. Thankfully, tools like PHPUnit, Mockery, and PHPSpec have provided an incredible number of options for testing in PHP—but it can still be pretty overwhelming to get everything set up.

Out of the box, Laravel comes with baked-in integrations to PHPUnit (unit testing), Behat (behavior-driven development), Mockery (mocking), and Faker (creating fake data for seeding and testing). It also comes with its own simple and powerful suite of application testing tools, which allow you to “crawl” your site’s URIs, click buttons, submit forms, check HTTP status codes, and validate and assert against JSON.

Laravel’s testing setup even has a sample application test that can run successfully the moment you create a new app. That means you don’t have to spend any time configuring your testing environment, and that’s one less barrier to writing your tests.

Testing Terms

It’s hard to get any group of programmers to agree on which terms they use to define different types of tests.

In this book, I’ll use three primary terms:

Unit tests

Unit tests target small, relatively isolated units—a class or method, usually.

Integration tests

Integration tests test the way individual units work together and ...