Laravel: Up & Running, 3rd Edition

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 provide 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 Pest and PHPUnit (unit testing), Mockery (mocking), and Faker (creating fake data for seeding and testing). It also provides its own simple and powerful suite of application testing tools, which allow you to “crawl” your site’s URIs, submit forms, check HTTP status codes, and validate and assert against JSON. It also provides a robust frontend testing framework called Dusk that can even interact with your JavaScript applications and test against them. In case this hasn’t made it clear, we’re going to cover a lot of ground in this chapter.

To make it easy for you to get started, Laravel’s testing setup comes with sample application tests 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.

In the latest versions of Laravel, Pest has become the default, but we’re sticking with PHPUnit here; all the lessons still ...