Asserting that an Eloquent model soft deletes

Ran into an unpleasant situation recently where I discovered a model that I thought was soft-deleting wasn't actually - database records were actually being removed. This meant that a few months of reporting data were thrown off completely and a lot of content was lost forever.

In addition to adding the SoftDeletes trait back to the model I also added tests to ensure this didn't happen again. Here's a small PHPUnit helper that might help you do the same.

/**
 * Assert that the given class soft deletes.
 *
 * @param  string  $model
 * @return void
 */
public function assertSoftDeletes(string $model)
{
    $instance = new $model;

    $this->assertUsesTrait(Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\SoftDeletes::class, $instance);
    $this->assertContains('deleted_at', $instance->getDates());
}

/**
 * Assert that the given class uses the provided trait name.
 *
 * @param  string  $trait
 * @param  mixed   $class
 * @return void
 */
public function assertUsesTrait($trait, $class)
{
    $this->assertContains($trait, class_uses($class));
}

It's easy to use, just pass the model's class name and you should be good to go.

/** @test */
function it_soft_deletes()
{
    $this->assertSoftDeletes(User::class);
}