Your First Functional Test¶

When we generated the EventBundle in the last screencast, it created 2 stub functional tests for us. How nice!

Create a Tests/Controller directory in UserBundle, copy one of the test files and rename it to RegisterControllerTest:

// src/Yoda/UserBundle/Tests/Controller/RegisterControllerTest.php
namespace Yoda\UserBundle\Tests\Controller;

use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Test\WebTestCase;

class RegisterControllerTest extends WebTestCase
{
    public function testRegister()
    {
        $client = static::createClient();
        // ...
    }
}

Rename the method to testRegister:

// src/Yoda/UserBundle/Tests/Controller/RegisterControllerTest.php
// ...

public function testRegister()
{
    $client = static::createClient();
    // ...
}

The idea is that each controller, like RegisterController will have its own test class, like RegisterControllerTest. Then, each action method, like registerAction, will have its own test method, like testRegister. There’s no technical reason you need to organize things like this. The only rule is that you need to start each method with the word “test”.

Using the Client object¶

That $client variable is like a browser that we can use to surf to pages on our site. Start small by testing that the /register page returns a 200 status code and that the word “Register” appears somewhere:

public function testRegister()
{
    $client = static::createClient();

    $client->request('GET', '/register');
    $response = $client->getResponse();

    $this->assertEquals(200, $response->getStatusCode());
    $this->assertContains('Register', $response->getContent());
}

The assertEquals and assertContains methods come from PHPUnit, the library that will actually run the test.

Installing PHPUnit¶

To run the test, we need PHPUnit: the de-facto tool for testing. You can install it globally or locally in this project via Composer. For the global option, check out their docs.

Let’s use Composer’s require command and search for phpunit:

php composer.phar require

Choose the phpunit/phpunit result. For a version, I’ll go to packagist.org and find the library. Right now, it looks like the latest version is 4.1.3. I’ll use the constraint ~4.1, which basically means 4.1 or higher.

This added phpunit/phpunit to the require key in composer.json and it ran the update command in the background to download it.

Running the Tests¶

We now have a bin/phpunit executable, so let’s use it! Pass it a -c app option:

php bin/phpunit -c app

bin\phpunit -c app

This tells PHPUnit to look for a configuration file in the app/ directory. And hey! There’s a phpunit.xml.dist file there already for it to read. This tells phpunit how to bootstrap and where to find our tests.

But we see a few errors. If you look closely, you’ll see that it’s executing the two test files that were generated automatically in EventBundle. Git rid of these troublemakers and try again:

rm src/Yoda/EventBundle/Tests/Controller/*Test.php
php bin/phpunit -c app

Green! PHPUnit runs our test, where we make a request to /register and check the status code and look for the word “Register”.

To see what a failed test looks like, change the test to check for Ackbar instead of Resgister and re-run it:

$this->assertContains('Ackbar', $response->getContent());

It doesn’t find it, but it does print out the page’s content, which we could use to debug. It’s a trap! Change the test back to look for Register:

$this->assertContains('Register', $response->getContent());

Traversing the Dom with the Crawler¶

When we call the request() function, it returns a Crawler object, which works a lot like the jQuery object in JavaScript. For example, to find the value of the username field, we can search by its id and use the attr function. It should be equal to “Leia”:

public function testRegister()
{
    $client = static::createClient();

    $crawler = $client->request('GET', '/register');
    $response = $client->getResponse();

    $this->assertEquals(200, $response->getStatusCode());
    $this->assertContains('Register', $response->getContent());

    $usernameVal = $crawler
        ->filter('#user_register_username')
        ->attr('value')
    ;
    $this->assertEquals('Leia', $usernameVal);
}

Re-run the test to see the result:

php bin/phpunit -c app