This package is intended to be a collection of helpful utilities to assist with the development and maintenance of Laravel Applications.

To install this package, run

$ composer require srlabs/laravel-testing-utilities

and then add the service provider to your service providers listing in app/config/app.php

'providers' => array(
        // ...
	    'SRLabs\Utilities\UtilitiesServiceProvider'
        // ...
	),

Currently in beta testing.

This utility makes it easy to implement the testing stratgey described by Chris Duell in his blog post Speeding up PHP unit tests 15 times. When running tests that require the use of a database persistence layer, running migrations and seeding the database for each test can take a very long time. Chris instead suggests creating a sqlite database file ahead of time, and making a new copy of that file for each test instead.

This package provides an artisan command ('utility:testdb') that will run your migrations and seeds and save them to a pre-defined sqlite file. Once that is complete, there is a companion trait that you add to your tests which will copy the staging database file to the testing database location when running tests.

You need to define a sqlite database connection in your config/database.php file. The connection name can be whatever you would like, but the package will assume a name of 'staging' if you don't provide one.

Default 'staging' connection:

$ php artisan utility:testdb

Custom 'sqlite_testing' connection:

$ php artisan utility:testdb sqlite_testing

You can also specify a Database Seeder class:

$ php artisan utility:testdb sqlite_testing --class="SentinelDatabaseSeeder"

This command will migrate and seed the sqlite database you have specified.

When you are ready to use this new sqlite file in your tests, add the TestingDatabase trait to your test class, and use it as such:

use SRLabs\Utilities\Traits\TestingDatabaseTrait;

class FooTest extends TestCase {
    
    use TestingDatabaseTrait;
    
    public function setUp()
    {
      parent::setUp();
     
      $this->prepareDatabase('staging', 'testing');
    }
    
    public function testSomethingIsTrue()
    {
        $this->assertTrue(true);
    }

}

In this example "staging" is the Database connection that represents the pre-compiled sqlite file, and "testing" is a separate connection that represents the database that will be used by the tests. Each time the setUp() method is called, the testing sqlite file will be replaced by the staging sqlite file, effectively resetting your database to a clean starting point. You may need to do some extra configuration to have phpunit use your "testing" database.