Effortlessly Testing with Pest in PHP 🐜🔍

Hello passionate PHP developer! Today, we are delving into the world of Pest - the PHP testing framework that prides itself on simplicity and elegance. This post assumes you are already familiar with PHP, Laravel and the concept of testing.

Getting Started with Pest 🚀

Before we dwelve into the meat and bones of Pest, let's install it first. As any seasoned PHP developer would know, we use Composer, PHP's principal package manager. Just head into your project's root directory and run the following command in your terminal:

composer require pestphp/pest --dev

This command installs Pest in your Laravel project. Note that we're adding the --dev so Pest becomes a development dependency. That means it won't tag along when your app's in production.

Writing Our First Test Case 🧪

Now that Pest is loaded and ready, it's time to write our first test case! Let's start with something simple: checking if our home page works.

it('has home page', function () {
    $response = $this->get('/');
    $response->assertStatus(200);
});

With Pest, test cases are more streamlined and easier to read. Here we have the it function describing our test case. We're simply sending a GET request to our home page (/) and asserting that the response status is 200. If our site is functioning correctly, we'll get a flat 200, otherwise, this test throws an error.

Higher Order Tests with Pest 🚀

On top of providing simple and elegant test case syntax, Pest allows you to write higher order tests. More about those in another post!

Now go out there and test all the things! 🧪

Remember though, as tech evolves quickly, some of the advice here may become outdated. I would suggest following up on your own for the most current best practices.

References:

1. Pest PHP Documentation
2. Composer Download instructions
3. Laravel Documentation

Happy coding! 🐘