Testing Laravel Controllers

There are a two main things that tripped me up while I was writing functional tests for my Laravel controllers: POST requests, and session state.

Laravel’s Controller class has the call() method, which essentially makes a GET request to a controller method. In order to make POST requests, it’s necessary to inject some extra parameters into the HttpFoundation components. To make this easier, I created a ControllerTestCase class with convenient get() and post() methods:

abstract class ControllerTestCase extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{

    public function call($destination, $parameters = array(), $method = 'GET')
    {
        $old_method = Request::foundation()->getMethod();
        \Laravel\Request::foundation()->setMethod($method);
        $response = Controller::call($destination, $parameters);
        Request::foundation()->setMethod($old_method);

        return $response;
    }

    public function get($destination, $parameters = array())
    {
        return $this->call($destination, $parameters, 'GET');
    }

    public function post($destination, $post_data, $parameters = array())
    {
        $this->clean_request();
        \Laravel\Request::foundation()->request->add($post_data);

        return $this->call($destination, $parameters, 'POST');
    }

    private function clean_request()
    {
        $request = \Laravel\Request::foundation()->request;

        foreach ($request->keys() as $key)
        {
            $request->remove($key);
        }
    }

}

Note that each POST request must be “cleaned” so that the POST data from previous requests isn’t retained (thanks wahyudinata for this tip!).

This makes it easy to write functional tests for Laravel controllers, for example checking the session for errors after a POST request:

require_once('ControllerTestCase.php');

class AccountControllerTest extends ControllerTestCase
{

    public function testSignupWithNoData()
    {
        $response = $this->post('account@signup', array());
        $this->assertEquals('302', $response->foundation->getStatusCode());

        $session_errors = \Laravel\Session::instance()->get('errors')->all();
        $this->assertNotEmpty($session_errors);
    }

    public function testSignupWithValidData()
    {
        $response = $this->post('account@signup', array(
            'username' => 'validusername',
            'email' => 'some@validemail.com',
            'password' => 'passw0rd',
            'password_confirm' => 'passw0rd',
        ));
        $this->assertEquals('302', $response->foundation->getStatusCode());

        $session_errors = \Laravel\Session::instance()->get('errors');
        $this->assertNull($session_errors);
    }

}

But here is where the session state tripped me up. In testSignupWithValidData, the Laravel session state from testSignupWithNoData is retained and the test fails. To get around this, I simply reload the session before each test, in a setUp method in ControllerTestCase:

abstract class ControllerTestCase extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{

    // ...

    public function setUp()
    {
        \Laravel\Session::load();
    }

}

And that’s it! A fairly simple ControllerTestCase class which solves the POST request and session state problems. See this Gist for the full code with comments.