Testing Laravel with PHPUnit

For a while I've been debating the best way to test Laravel apps. From unit testing models, functional testing controllers and integration testing your experience there are a number of tools that can help you automate this process. I've done a lot of reading on the matter, including the well-known (and soon to be replace, I believe) Laravel Testing Decoded by Jeffrey Way. While I'd love for an all-in-one testing solution it doesn't seem like we're quite there yet.

PHPUnit is probably the de-facto PHP testing package, but it doesn't support integration testing. PHPSpec has a really refined way of doing unit testing, but there's no great way to functional test your Laravel controllers (you could unit test them, but eh). Finally Codeception provides unit testing through PHPUnit, a really great integration testing library that supports Laravel, but the funtional testing is shot (I could go on about this, but functional and acceptance tests in Codeception hardly differ, it's stupid).

PHPUnit for Laravel models and controllers

At the moment I'm foregoing the use of integration testing, and simply testing my models and controllers through PHPUnit. One of the biggest problems I came across when getting into the testing of Laravel was the ability to look through an existing (real-world) codebase that was tested. It's for this reason, I've left this very blog open-source so that people inteterested in learning to test Laravel with PHPUnit can have a browse through and learn from it.

I was going to go ahead and test the blog with all three frameworks, but PHPUnit just wasn't going to play nicely with Laravel. I might consider adding a Codeception testing suite to this blog as well just for the sake of it but we'll see.

Neon Tsunami and it's PHPUnit tests

You might notice that I don't unit test my models - I use TestDummy to hit my database and actually test the application. Maybe it's just my Rails background, but I want to hit the database and make sure the app is responding as I expect.

See the builds on CircleCI (with a huge shout-out to them for adding free builds for public repos).