laravel4cookbook

Controller Testing
Testing is a hot topic these days. Everyone knows that having tests is a good thing, but often they’re
either “too busy” to write them, or they just don’t know how.
Even if you do write tests, it may not always be clear what the best way is to prepare for them.
Perhaps you’re used to writing them against a particular framework (which I’m assuming is not
Laravel 4) or you tend to write fewer when you can’t figure out how exactly to test a particular
section of your application.
I have recently spent much time writing tests, and learning spades about how to write them. I have
Jeffrey Way to thank, both for Laravel: Testing Decoded¹ and Laracasts.com². These resources
have taught me just about everything I know about unit/functional testing.
This article is about some of the practical things you can do to make your code easier to test, and
how you would go about writing functional/unit tests against that code. If you take nothing else
away, after reading this, you should be subscribed to Laracasts.com and you should read Laravel:
Testing Decoded.
Since there’s already so much in the way of testing, I thought it would be better just to focus on the
subject of how to write testable controllers, and then how to test that they are doing what they are
supposed to be doing.
.
The code for this chapter can be found at: https://github.com/formativ/tutorial-laravel-4-
testing
https://github.com/formativ/tutorial-laravel-4-testing
Installing Dependencies
For this chapter, we’re going to be using PHPUnit and Mockery. Both of these libraries are used in
testing, and can be installed at the same time, by running the following commands:
¹https://leanpub.com/laravel-testing-decoded
²http://laracasts.com