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22.

Functional Test for the Upload Endpoint

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How can we write automated tests for all of this? Well... I have so many answers for that. First, you could unit test your message classes. I don't normally do this... because those classes tend to be so simple... but if your class is a bit more complex or you want to play it safe, you can totally unit test this.

More important are the message handlers: it's definitely a good idea to test these. You could write unit tests and mock the dependencies or write an integration test... depending on what's most useful for what each handler does.

The point is: for message and message handler classes... testing them has absolutely nothing to do with messenger or transports or async or workers: they're just well-written PHP classes that we can test like anything else. That's really one of the beautiful things about messenger: above all else, you're just writing nice code.

But functional tests are more interesting. For example, open src/Controller/ImagePostController.php. The create() method is the upload endpoint and it does a couple of things: like saving the ImagePost to the database and, most important for us, dispatching the AddPonkaToImage object.

Writing a functional test for this endpoint is actually fairly straightforward. But what if we wanted to be able to test not only that this endpoint "appears" to have worked, but also that the AddPonkaToImage object was, in fact, sent to the transport? After all, we can't test that Ponka was actually added to the image because, by the time the response is returned, it hasn't happened yet!

Test Setup

Let's get the functional test working first, before we get all fancy. Start by finding an open terminal and running:

composer require phpunit --dev

That installs Symfony's test-pack, which includes the PHPUnit bridge - a sort of "wrapper" around PHPUnit that makes life easier. When it finishes, it tells us to write our tests inside the tests/ directory - brilliant idea - and execute them by running php bin/phpunit. That little file was just added by the recipe and it handles all the details of getting PHPUnit running.

Ok, step one: create the test class. Inside tests, create a new Controller/ directory and then a new PHP Class: ImagePostControllerTest. Instead of making this extend the normal TestCase from PHPUnit, extend WebTestCase, which will give us the functional testing superpowers we deserve... and need. The class lives in FrameworkBundle but... be careful because there are (gasp) two classes with this name! The one you want lives in the Test namespace. The one you don't want lives in the Tests namespace... so it's super confusing. It should look like this. If you choose the wrong one, delete the use statement and try again.

14 lines | tests/Controller/ImagePostControllerTest.php
// ... lines 1 - 2
namespace App\Tests\Controller;
use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Test\WebTestCase;
class ImagePostControllerTest extends WebTestCase
{
// ... lines 9 - 12
}

But.... while writing this tutorial and getting mad about this confusing part, I created an issue on the Symfony repository. And I'm thrilled that by the time I recorded the audio, the other class has already been renamed! Thanks to janvt who jumped on that. Go open source!

Anyways, because we're going to test the create() endpoint, add public function testCreate(). Inside, to make sure things are working, I'll try my favorite $this->assertEquals(42, 42).

14 lines | tests/Controller/ImagePostControllerTest.php
// ... lines 1 - 2
namespace App\Tests\Controller;
use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Test\WebTestCase;
class ImagePostControllerTest extends WebTestCase
{
public function testCreate()
{
$this->assertEquals(42, 42);
}
}

Running the Test

Notice that I didn't get any auto-completion on this. That's because PHPUnit itself hasn't been downloaded yet. Check it out: find your terminal and run the tests with:

php bin/phpunit

This little script uses Composer to download PHPUnit into a separate directory in the background, which is nice because it means you can get any version of PHPUnit, even if some of its dependencies clash with those in your project.

Once it's done... ding! Our one test is green. And the next time we run:

php bin/phpunit

it jumps straight to the tests. And now that PHPUnit is downloaded, once PhpStorm builds its cache, that yellow background on assertEquals() will go away.

Testing the Upload Endpoint

To test the endpoint itself, we first need an image that we can upload. Inside the tests/ directory, let's create a fixtures/ directory to hold that image. Now I'll copy one of the images I've been uploading into this directory and name it ryan-fabien.jpg.

There it is. The test itself is pretty simple: create a client with $client = static::createClient() and an UploadedFile object that will represent the file being uploaded: $uploadedFile = new UploadedFile() passing the path to the file as the first argument - __DIR__.'/../fixtures/ryan-fabien.jpg - and the filename as the second - ryan-fabien.jpg.

25 lines | tests/Controller/ImagePostControllerTest.php
// ... lines 1 - 5
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\File\UploadedFile;
class ImagePostControllerTest extends WebTestCase
{
public function testCreate()
{
$client = static::createClient();
$uploadedFile = new UploadedFile(
__DIR__.'/../fixtures/ryan-fabien.jpg',
'ryan-fabien.jpg'
);
// ... lines 18 - 22
}
}

Why the, sorta, "redundant" second argument? When you upload a file in a browser, your browser sends two pieces of information: the physical contents of the file and the name of the file on your filesystem.

Finally, we can make the request: $client->request(). The first argument is the method... which is POST, then the URL - /api/images - we don't need any GET or POST parameters, but we do need to pass an array of files.

25 lines | tests/Controller/ImagePostControllerTest.php
// ... lines 1 - 5
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\File\UploadedFile;
class ImagePostControllerTest extends WebTestCase
{
public function testCreate()
{
$client = static::createClient();
$uploadedFile = new UploadedFile(
__DIR__.'/../fixtures/ryan-fabien.jpg',
'ryan-fabien.jpg'
);
$client->request('POST', '/api/images', [], [
// ... line 19
]);
// ... lines 21 - 22
}
}

If you look in ImagePostController, we're expecting the name of the uploaded file - that's normally the name attribute on the <input field - to literally be file. Not the most creative name ever... but sensible. Use that key in our test and set it to the $uploadedFile object.

25 lines | tests/Controller/ImagePostControllerTest.php
// ... lines 1 - 5
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\File\UploadedFile;
class ImagePostControllerTest extends WebTestCase
{
public function testCreate()
{
$client = static::createClient();
$uploadedFile = new UploadedFile(
__DIR__.'/../fixtures/ryan-fabien.jpg',
'ryan-fabien.jpg'
);
$client->request('POST', '/api/images', [], [
'file' => $uploadedFile
]);
dd($client->getResponse()->getContent());
}
}

And... that's it! To see if it worked, let's just dd($client->getResponse()->getContent()).

25 lines | tests/Controller/ImagePostControllerTest.php
// ... lines 1 - 5
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\File\UploadedFile;
class ImagePostControllerTest extends WebTestCase
{
public function testCreate()
{
$client = static::createClient();
$uploadedFile = new UploadedFile(
__DIR__.'/../fixtures/ryan-fabien.jpg',
'ryan-fabien.jpg'
);
$client->request('POST', '/api/images', [], [
'file' => $uploadedFile
]);
dd($client->getResponse()->getContent());
}
}

Testing time! Find your terminal, clear the screen, deep breath and...

php bin/phpunit

Got it! And we get a new id each time we run it. The ImagePost records are saving to our normal database because I haven't gone to the trouble of creating a separate database for my test environment. That is something I normally like to do.

Asserting Success

Remove the dd(): let's use a real assertion: $this->assertResponseIsSuccessful().

25 lines | tests/Controller/ImagePostControllerTest.php
// ... lines 1 - 7
class ImagePostControllerTest extends WebTestCase
{
public function testCreate()
// ... lines 11 - 21
$this->assertResponseIsSuccessful();
}
}

This nice method was added in Symfony 4.3... and it's not the only one: this new WebTestAssertionsTrait has a ton of nice new methods for testing a whole bunch of stuff!

If we stopped now... this is a nice test and you might be perfectly happy with it. But... there's one part that's not ideal. Right now, when we run our test, the AddPonkaToImage message is actually being sent to our transport... or at least we think it is... we're not actually verifying that this happened... though we can check manually right now.

To make this test more useful, we can do one of two different things. First, we could override the transports to be synchronous in the test environment - just like we did with dev. Then, if handling the message failed, our test would fail.

Or, second, we could at least write some code here that proves that the message was at least sent to the transport. Right now, it's possible that the endpoint could return 200... but some bug in our code caused the message never to be dispatched.

Let's add that check next, by leveraging a special "in memory" transport.