Testing¶

ℹ️ New to testing your web application?

While we don't want to force you to test your app, we want to emphasize the importance of automated test suites and try hard to make testing your web application as easy as possible.

Tests allow you to verify correct behavior of your implementation, so that you match expected behavior with the actual implementation. And perhaps more importantly, by automating this process you can be sure future changes do not introduce any regressions and suddenly break something else. Develop your application with ease and certainty.

We ❤️ TDD!

PHPUnit basics¶

Once your app is structured into dedicated controller classes as per the previous chapter, we can test each controller class in isolation. This way, testing becomes pretty straight forward.

Let's start simple and write some unit tests for our simple HelloController class:

src/HelloController.php

<?php

namespace Acme\Todo;

use React\Http\Message\Response;

class HelloController
{
    public function __invoke()
    {
        return Response::plaintext(
            "Hello wörld!\n"
        );
    }
}

As a first step, we need to install PHPUnit with Composer by running this command in the project directory:

$ composer require --dev phpunit/phpunit

ℹ️ New to PHPUnit?

If you haven't heard about PHPUnit before, PHPUnit is the testing framework for PHP projects. After installing it as a development dependency, we can take advantage of its structure to write tests for our own application.

Next, we can start by creating our first unit test:

tests/HelloControllerTest.php

<?php

namespace Acme\Tests\Todo;

use Acme\Todo\HelloController;
use PHPUnit\Framework\TestCase;
use Psr\Http\Message\ResponseInterface;
use React\Http\Message\ServerRequest;

class HelloControllerTest extends TestCase
{
    public function testControllerReturnsValidResponse()
    {
        $request = new ServerRequest('GET', 'http://example.com/');

        $controller = new HelloController();
        $response = $controller($request);

        $this->assertInstanceOf(ResponseInterface::class, $response);
        $this->assertEquals(200, $response->getStatusCode());
        $this->assertEquals("Hello wörld!\n", (string) $response->getBody());
    }
}

We're intentionally starting simple. By starting with a controller class following a somewhat trivial implementation, we can focus on just getting the test suite up and running first. All following tests will also follow a somewhat similar structure, so we can always use this as a simple building block:

create an HTTP request object
pass it into our controller function
and then run assertions on the expected HTTP response object.

Once you've created your first unit tests, it's time to run PHPUnit by executing this command in the project directory:

$ vendor/bin/phpunit tests
PHPUnit 9.5.4 by Sebastian Bergmann and contributors.

.                                                                   1 / 1 (100%)

Time: 00:00.006, Memory: 4.00 MB

OK (1 test, 1 assertion)

Testing with specific requests¶

Once the basic test setup works, let's continue with testing a controller that shows different behavior depending on what HTTP request comes in. For this example, we're using request attributes, but the same logic applies to testing different URLs, HTTP request headers, etc.:

src/UserController.php

<?php

namespace Acme\Todo;

use Psr\Http\Message\ServerRequestInterface;
use React\Http\Message\Response;

class UserController
{
    public function __invoke(ServerRequestInterface $request)
    {
        return Response::plaintext(
            "Hello " . $request->getAttribute('name') . "!\n"
        );
    }
}

Again, we create a new test class matching the controller class:

tests/UserControllerTest.php

<?php

namespace Acme\Tests\Todo;

use Acme\Todo\UserController;
use PHPUnit\Framework\TestCase;
use Psr\Http\Message\ResponseInterface;
use React\Http\Message\ServerRequest;

class UserControllerTest extends TestCase
{
    public function testControllerReturnsValidResponse()
    {
        $request = new ServerRequest('GET', 'http://example.com/users/Alice');
        $request = $request->withAttribute('name', 'Alice');

        $controller = new UserController();
        $response = $controller($request);

        $this->assertInstanceOf(ResponseInterface::class, $response);
        $this->assertEquals(200, $response->getStatusCode());
        $this->assertEquals("Hello Alice!\n", (string) $response->getBody());
    }
}

This follows the exact same logic like the previous example, except this time we're setting up a specific HTTP request and asserting the HTTP response contains the correct name. Again, we can run PHPUnit in the project directory to see this works as expected:

$ vendor/bin/phpunit tests
PHPUnit 9.5.4 by Sebastian Bergmann and contributors.

..                                                                  2 / 2 (100%)

Time: 00:00.003, Memory: 4.00 MB

OK (2 tests, 2 assertions)

Testing¶

PHPUnit basics¶

Testing with specific requests¶

Further reading¶