Laravel was built to make developer life easy, and testing and fixing errors is a demanding phase in any development process. Keeping in mind the testing process is more integrated and manageable. The creators made Laravel the comprehensive testing framework which allows Laravel development companies to write and execute tests effortlessly.
Laravel has various tools and features to simplify the process of testing. This is made possible with PHPUnit.
PHPUnit is the unit test package that comes with PHP, designed to make testing easy, helping developers test the tiniest components smoothly. PHPUnit provides a rich set of features and assertions for unit testing PHP code. Although it already has some excellent qualifications but lacks in some areas. With Laravel, PHPUnit gets an edge and opens more gates of possibilities for remote developers for testing.
Laravel comes with PHPUnit out of the box, and the initial setup is already configured in the phpunit.xml file. It also comes with various helper methods that assist in writing tests and help to simplify usual testing tasks and provide convenient shortcuts.
To make testing easy, Laravel included two ways to test by default. Just like to do certain things, companies hire remote developers with different skill sets. Similarly, for testing different sorts of codes, Laravel has two important testing tools, Feature and Unit.
Unit tests focus on testing individual units of code, such as methods or functions, in isolation. It's dedicated to unit testing and provides a location to store your unit test files.
Meanwhile, Feature tests, also known as integration tests, focus on testing the behaviour and interaction of multiple components or features of your application. Unlike unit tests, feature tests can span across multiple classes, methods, or even routes. They simulate real user scenarios and often involve interacting with databases, making HTTP requests, and asserting the expected responses.
Unit tests focus on isolated units of code, while feature tests verify the interaction and behaviour of multiple components working together. By writing both types of tests, you can thoroughly test your application at different levels and catch any potential issues.
Creating tests in Laravel is an easy task and here is how you can execute it in just a few simple steps. You can use the make:test Artisan command and generate a new test file.
CODE
php artisan make:test TestName
Just simply copy-paste the given command and replace TestName with the desired name for your test. The command will create a directory in tests/Feature directory by default, and if you want to make use of a unit, then simply use the following given command.
php artisan make:test TestName –unit
After creating the test, you can run your test using PHPUnit.
php artisan test
By running the given command, the Laravel test runner will execute all the tests in your tests directory, including subdirectories like Unit and Feature.
And that’s how you create and run tests in Laravel. Compared to PHPUnit included In PHP, Laravel offers more functionality with added features. All these new features translate to providing the best Laravel development solutions.
