Create a PHPUnit Test

Learn how to create a PHPUnit test in the Symfony web application.

We'll cover the following

Now that we have created a page and a PHP function, we can make some tests to run on our web application. This follows proper CI/CD processes, as we should always run tests on our code before deploying to web servers.

Set up PHPUnit

First, we’ll need to add the PHPUnit Composer package to run tests.

  • In the terminal below, run:
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composer require --dev symfony/test-pack

This will install development testing environment packages for running tests in our Symfony web application.

Now, run unit tests by running this command:

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php bin/phpunit

We should get No tests executed!. This is because we don’t have tests yet. We’ll add a test in the next step.

We can now move on to create a PHPUnit test.

Terminal 1
Terminal
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Write a PHPUnit test

Now, we are ready to create a unit test.

  1. Under the tests/Controller folder in the SPA widget below, there is a NewPageControllerTest.php file created for you.
  2. Add the code below to this NewPageControllerTest.php file.
    • This code is a new PHPUnit class with a testSomething function, which creates a NewPageContoller class that we created before. It calls the personalMessage function and finally makes sure it returns PHP is cool.

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<?php 
namespace App\Tests;
use PHPUnit\Framework\TestCase;
use App\Controller\NewPageController;
class NewPageControllerTest extends TestCase
{
    public function testSomething()
    {
        $newPage = new NewPageController;
        $this->assertEquals("PHP is cool", $newPage->personalMessage());
    }
}
  1. Now, click the “Run” button in the SPA widget.
  2. After the app loads, run the test in the terminal.
  3. Click the plus icon to open a new terminal tab.
  4. Run cd /usercode.
  5. Then, run the following command to run the PHPUnit test:

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php bin/phpunit

The terminal output should show the following. This indicates our test ran, and it passed!

educative@educative:~/symfony-app/usercode$ php bin/phpunit 
PHPUnit 9.5.26 by Sebastian Bergmann and contributors.

Testing 
.                                                                   1 / 1 (100%)

Time: 00:00.018, Memory: 10.00 MB

OK (1 test, 1 assertion)

#!/usr/bin/env php
<?php

use App\Kernel;
use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Console\Application;

if (!is_file(dirname(__DIR__).'/vendor/autoload_runtime.php')) {
    throw new LogicException('Symfony Runtime is missing. Try running "composer require symfony/runtime".');
}

require_once dirname(__DIR__).'/vendor/autoload_runtime.php';

return function (array $context) {
    $kernel = new Kernel($context['APP_ENV'], (bool) $context['APP_DEBUG']);

    return new Application($kernel);
};
Creating the PHPUnit test

Summary

In this lesson, we set up our project to run PHPUnit tests and created a PHPUnit test, which tests our NewPageController personalMessage PHP function.

Well done on creating the PHPUnit test!