Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / AI

testing

All my posts about testing.

php laravel best practices pest phpunit

Regaining trust in your test suite with Docker

Frank de Jonge, creator and maintainer of Flysystem, recently started using Docker to test the FTP driver. On his blog he explains the why and how.

For Flysystem, an open source PHP package to deal with filesystems, I needed a way to test FTP (barf) interactions. FTP servers are notoriously bad at abiding by the spec. ... For Flysystem's FTP(d) adapter an integration test, using an actual FTP server, brought back the level of confidence it needed.

https://blog.frankdejonge.nl/regaining-trust-in-your-tests-with-docker/

Read more

Join 9,500+ smart developers

Get my monthly newsletter with what I learn from running Spatie, building Oh Dear, and maintaining 300+ open source packages. Practical takes on Laravel, PHP, and AI that you can actually use.

No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. You can also follow me on X.

Automatic visual diffing with Puppeteer

Monica Dinculescu, an engineer at Google, shares on her blog how you can use Puppeteer, Mocha and Pixelmatch to create automated visual tests of a webpage.

I did a little song-and-dance that sets up Puppeteer* , takes screenshots of your app (like, all the routes you care about), and then compares them to the “golden” ones. If they match, your test passes! Yes, it only works on Chrome. No, it’s not actually unit testing. Yes, it’s literally just counting pixels but you know what? It counts them in both a wide and a narrow viewport size and any testing is better than no testing at all; fight me.

https://meowni.ca/posts/2017-puppeteer-tests/

Read more

How to send a "trial expiring soon" mail in Laravel Spark original

by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

I'm currently building a webapp named Oh Dear: an easy to use and beautiful website monitor. It has recently gone into it's beta phase. At the moment of writing everybody can register a new account. After you've registered you'll start your trial period of 10 days. Oh Dear is built on top Laravel…

Read more

An approach to testing middleware

Laravel rockstar TJ Miller posted a short and sweet post how how he tested a middleware that forces requests to respond with JSON.

So what I’ve done here is define custom testing routes and applied the middleware as I would use it in the application routes, in this case global middleware and as middleware for the api group. This allows me to assert that the middleware is configured and functioning correctly.

https://medium.com/@sixlive/an-approach-to-testing-middleware-c547fc942848

Read more

Write tests. Not too many. Mostly integration.

In a fantastic post on his blog, Kent C. Dodds makes the case for focusing on writing integration tests, and stop going for 100% code coverage. Amen to that!

You may also find yourself testing implementation details just so you can make sure you get that one line of code that’s hard to reproduce in a test environment. You really want to avoid testing implementation details because it doesn’t give you very much confidence that your application is working and it slows you down when refactoring. You should very rarely have to change tests when you refactor code.

https://blog.kentcdodds.com/write-tests-not-too-many-mostly-integration-5e8c7fff591c

Read more

Messing around with HTTP status codes

The HTTP specification says that status codes should be three digits integers, but what happens if they are not? April King, head of website security at Mozilla, did some fun experiments to find out.

While it is easy to create test cases for conditions that don't satisfy this requirement, it is somewhat more difficult to determine how third-party libraries will handle HTTP requests that fall outside this constraint. I looked around the internet for websites to help me test weird status codes, but most of them only let me test with the known status codes. As such, I decided to add arbitrary HTTP status codes to my naughty httpbin fork, called misbehaving.site.

What I discovered is that the various browser manufacturers have wildly different behavior with how they handle unknown HTTP status codes.

https://pokeinthe.io/2017/09/14/http-status-code-handling/

Read more

Unit testing Vue.js components with the official Vue testing tools and Jest

An official toolset for testing Vue components will be released soon. In a new series Jover Morales tells you all about it.

vue-test-utils, the official VueJS testing library and based on avoriaz, is just around the corner. @EddYerburgh is indeed doing a very good job creating it. It provides all necessary tooling for making easy to write unit test in a VueJS application.

Jest, on the other side, is the testing framework developed at Facebook, which makes testing a breeze, with awesome features such as:

  • Almost no config by default
  • Very cool interactive mode
  • Run tests in parallel
  • Spies, stubs and mocks out of the box
  • Built in code coverage
  • Snapshot testing
  • Module mocking utilities

https://alexjoverm.github.io/series/Unit-Testing-Vue-js-Components-with-the-Official-Vue-Testing-Tools-and-Jest/

Read more

How to write JavaScript-style test watchers in PHP

Christoper Pitt published another excellent piece over at Sitepoint. This time he describes how he built a watcher to automatically recompile his preprocessed code and rerun the tests.

In order to reduce the burden of invoking the transformation scripts, boilerplate projects have started to include scripts to automatically watch for file changes; and thereafter invoke these scripts.

These projects I’ve worked on have used a similar approach to re-run unit tests. When I change the JavaScript files, these files are transformed and the unit tests are re-run. This way, I can immediately see if I’ve broken anything.

https://www.sitepoint.com/write-javascript-style-test-watchers-php/

Read more

HTTP Tools Roundup

Curl is not your only tool when creating or testing out APIs. On her blog Lorna Jane Mitchell made a nice list of alternatives.

At a conference a few days ago, I put up a slide with a few of my favourite tools on it. I got some brilliant additional recommendations in return from twitter so I thought I'd collect them all in one place in case anyone is interested - all these tools are excellent for anyone working APIs (so that's everyone!).

https://lornajane.net/posts/2017/http-tools-roundup

Read more

Using non-breakable spaces in test method names

Mattieu Napoli shows how you can use non breaking spaces to make long test function names more readable.

Yes. This article is about using non-breakable spaces to name tests. And the fact that it’s awesome. And why you should use them too.

public function test a user can add a product to a wishlist() { // ... }

The code above is valid PHP code and works. Non-breaking spaces (aka   in HTML) look like spaces in editors but are actually interpreted like any other character by PHP.

http://mnapoli.fr/using-non-breakable-spaces-in-test-method-names/

It's cool that it works, but I'm not really a fan of this. I very much prefer how test runners like jest go about this by passing the name of the test to a function so you can use spaces.

Read more

What is snapshot testing, and is it viable in PHP?

In a new blogpost at Sitepoint Christopher Pitt talks about snapshot testing. He first explains how snapshot testing can help test React components. Then he demonstrates how you can use our home grown package to use snapshot testing in PHP. Finally he shows pretty cool use cases for snapshot tests.

Ah-ha moments are beautiful and rare in programming. Every so often, we’re fortunate enough to discover some trick or facet of a system that forever changes how we think of it.

For me, that’s what snapshot testing is.

You probably write a lot of PHP code, but today I want to talk about something I learned in JavaScript. We’ll learn about what snapshot testing is and then see how it can help us write better PHP applications.

https://www.sitepoint.com/snapshot-testing-viable-php/

If you want know more about snapshot testing, check out this blogpost by my colleague Sebastian, or watch this video where I refactor some tests to use snapshots.

Read more