Emmanuel Corrales

Emmanuel Corrales

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Laravel: Testing models

20 Jun 2018

This past week I’ve been using Laravel at work and has been trying to apply Test Driven Development. My first step was to learn how to test the models which I’ll be demonstrating in this tutorial using Laravel 5.6. We’ll create a new project which has an Article model with attributes title, content and views.

Let’s start creating a new Laravel project with:

laravel new blog

or

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel blog

Setup the Article model and the database table

Make an Article model with a migration.

php artisan make:model Article -m

The generated file for Article model will be at app/Article.php.

<?php
namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Article extends Model
{
    // No implementation yet
}

The articles table should have columns title, content and views so we’ll add those columns on our migration file at database/migrations/create_articles_table.php.

<?php

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;

class CreateArticlesTable extends Migration
{
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::create('articles', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->increments('id');
            $table->timestamps();

            $table->string('title');
            $table->text('content');
            $table->integer('views')->default(0);
        });
    }

    public function down()
    {
        Schema::dropIfExists('articles');
    }
}

Then run the migration for creating the table for articles.

php artisan migrate

Creating tests for the Article model

Our Article model is now ready for testing and we’ll be making integration tests but before that let’s make a factory.

php artisan make:factory ArticleFactory --model=Article

The generated factory for the model Article will be at database/factories/ArticleFactory.php.

<?php

use Faker\Generator as Faker;

$factory->define(App\Article::class, function (Faker $faker) {
    return [
        'title' => $faker->name,
        'content' => $faker->sentence
    ];
});

Create an integration test for the Article model at tests/Integration/models/ArticleTest.php by running:

touch tests/Integration/models/ArticleTest.php

Modify its contents to look like this:

<?php

namespace Tests\Integration\models;

use App\Article;
use Tests\TestCase;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\RefreshDatabase;

class ArticleTest extends TestCase
{
    /** @test */
    function it_fetches_most_viewed_articles()
    {
        factory(Article::class, 5)->create();
        factory(Article::class)->create(['views' => 100]);
        $mostViewed = factory(Article::class)->create(['views' => 200]);

        $articles = Article::mostViewed();

        $this->assertEquals($mostViewed->id, $articles->first()->id);
    }
}

Our test creates 5 articles with 0 views, another article with 100 views and the most viewed article with 200 views. It checks if the method Articke::mostViewed() returns the same id as the most viewed article.

Running the test and adjusting the model based on the results

Now we run phpunit:

phpunit tests/Integration/models/ArticleTest

or

./vendor/bin/phpunit tests/Integration/models/ArticleTest

if the command above doesn’t work.

The test would fail because the Article::mostViewed() method hasn’t been implemented. Let’s implement the Article::mostViewed() method by modifying the Article model to look like this:

<?php
namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Article extends Model
{
    public function scopeMostViewed($query)
    {
        $query->orderBy('views','desc');
    }
}

If you run phpunit now it would still fail because the data from the last test persisted. We need to refresh the database everytime the test is executed. We refresh it by using RefreshDatabase from “Illuminate\Foundation\Testing”. ArticleTest should look like this:

<?php

namespace Tests\Integration;

use App\Article;
use Tests\TestCase;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\RefreshDatabase;

class ArticleTest extends TestCase
{
    use RefreshDatabase;

    /** @test */
    function it_fetches_most_viewed_articles()
    {
        factory(Article::class, 5)->create();
        factory(Article::class)->create(['views' => 100]);
        $mostViewed = factory(Article::class)->create(['views' => 200]);

        $articles = Article::mostViewed();

        $this->assertEquals($mostViewed->id, $articles->first()->id);
    }
}

If you run phpunit the test would succeed.

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