Mastering Unit Testing in PHP with Pest: A Guide for Web Developers

Mastering Unit Testing in PHP with Pest: A Guide for Web Developers 🚀

Hello, Fantastic Folks! Today, we’ll take a deep dive into the art of unit testing in PHP using the Pest PHP testing framework. Pest is a minimalist, elegant testing framework inspired by Jest, a popular JavaScript testing library. Simple, powerful and flexible—that's the essence of Pest! 🌟

Are we all aboard for this adventure? Great! We'll be exploring several topics, starting from the installation process, writing a sample test, running the test, and finally, making assertions.

It's time to engage first gear and get moving 🚗

Installation ⚙️

To kick things off, we need to install Pest into a PHP project. Pest isn't bundled with PHP, so we have to include it via Composer. To add Pest to your project, open up a terminal and enter:

composer require pestphp/pest --dev

Your PHP project will now be equipped with the awesome Pest package!

Writing Tests 🖋

Pest provides a seamless testing experience. Let's write our first unit test together.

Firstly, start by creating a new directory called tests in your project root. Inside tests, create a file named ExampleTest.php.

Our test will be super simple. We'll be testing whether the sum of 2 numbers equals 4. Place the following code in ExampleTest.php.

<?php

it('adds', function () {
    assertTrue(2 + 2 === 4);
});

Congrats! You've just written your first test 😊

Running the Test 🚦

Ready to put your test into action? Run the following command in your terminal:

vendor/bin/pest

If everything went well, you should see a message stating that your test passed successfully 🏆

Making Assertions 📜

Pest uses PHPUnit’s assertions out of the box, providing a wide variety of methods to validate return output, attribute values, array contents, and much more.

Here's an example of Pest assertion:

<?php

it('has welcome page', function () {
    $response = get('/');

    assertResponse($response)->isOk();
    assertResponse($response)->contains('Welcome');
});

In the snippet above, we are testing if the homepage ('/') returns a response that is okay and contains the text 'Welcome'.

This was a quick tour 🎠 of Pest, the flexible and powerful testing tool. Just remember though, like all tools, Pest is just as efficient as the developer wielding it. Make comprehensive and meaningful tests—and have fun doing it 🎉