Testing Laravel Apps

Feature tests

Laravel ships with PHPUnit and Pest support. Feature tests call your routes and check the result:

use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\RefreshDatabase;

class PostApiTest extends TestCase
{
    use RefreshDatabase;                         // a clean database for every test

    public function test_users_can_create_posts(): void
    {
        $user = User::factory()->create();

        $this->actingAs($user)
            ->postJson('/api/posts', ['title' => 'Hello'])
            ->assertCreated()
            ->assertJsonPath('data.title', 'Hello');

        $this->assertDatabaseHas('posts', ['title' => 'Hello', 'user_id' => $user->id]);
    }

    public function test_title_is_required(): void
    {
        $this->actingAs(User::factory()->create())
            ->postJson('/api/posts', [])
            ->assertUnprocessable()
            ->assertJsonValidationErrors('title');
    }
}

Run them with php artisan test (add --parallel for speed). Fakes keep tests fast and offline: Mail::fake(), Queue::fake(), Event::fake(), Notification::fake(), Storage::fake(), and Http::fake() for outgoing API calls.

The code

The runnable example uses the same request-and-assert approach (this tutorial's visit() helper does what postJson does in a test), including faking an outgoing HTTP API.

<?php
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Http;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Route;

Route::post('/convert', function (Request $request) {
    $data = $request->validate(['amount' => 'required|numeric|min:0', 'to' => 'required|in:EUR,GBP']);
    $rate = Http::get('https://rates.example.com/latest', ['to' => $data['to']])->json('rate');
    return ['amount' => round($data['amount'] * $rate, 2), 'currency' => $data['to']];
});

Http::fake(['rates.example.com/*' => Http::response(['rate' => 0.92])]);   // no real network call

$check = function (string $name, bool $ok) {
    echo ($ok ? 'PASS' : 'FAIL'), " $name\n";
};

$response = visit('POST', '/convert', ['amount' => 100, 'to' => 'EUR']);
$check('converts with the fetched rate', $response->getStatusCode() === 200 && json_decode($response->getContent())->amount == 92);

$response = visit('POST', '/convert', ['amount' => -5, 'to' => 'JPY']);
$errors = array_keys(json_decode($response->getContent(), true)['errors'] ?? []);
$check('rejects invalid input with 422', $response->getStatusCode() === 422 && $errors === ['amount', 'to']);

Http::assertSent(fn ($request) => str_contains($request->url(), 'to=EUR'));
$check('called the rates API with the right currency', true);

POST /convert -> 200 {"amount":92,"currency":"EUR"}
PASS converts with the fetched rate
POST /convert -> 422 {"message":"The amount field must be at least 0. (and 1 more error)","errors":{"amount":["The amount field must be at least 0."],"to":["The selected to is invalid."]}}
PASS rejects invalid input with 422
PASS called the rates API with the right currency