How to Simulate Authentication with a Token in a Functional Test

Authenticating requests in functional tests might slow down the suite. It could become an issue especially when form_login is used, since it requires additional requests to fill in and submit the form.

One of the solutions is to configure your firewall to use http_basic in the test environment as explained in How to Simulate HTTP Authentication in a Functional Test. Another way would be to create a token yourself and store it in a session. While doing this, you have to make sure that an appropriate cookie is sent with a request. The following example demonstrates this technique:

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        // src/Acme/DemoBundle/Tests/Controller/DemoControllerTest.php
namespace Acme\DemoBundle\Tests\Controller;

use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Test\WebTestCase;
use Symfony\Component\BrowserKit\Cookie;
use Symfony\Component\Security\Core\Authentication\Token\UsernamePasswordToken;

class DemoControllerTest extends WebTestCase
{
    private $client = null;

    public function setUp()
    {
        $this->client = static::createClient();
    }

    public function testSecuredHello()
    {
        $this->logIn();

        $crawler = $this->client->request('GET', '/demo/secured/hello/Fabien');

        $this->assertTrue($this->client->getResponse()->isSuccessful());
        $this->assertGreaterThan(0, $crawler->filter('html:contains("Hello Fabien")')->count());
    }

    private function logIn()
    {
        $session = $this->client->getContainer()->get('session');

        $firewall = 'secured_area';
        $token = new UsernamePasswordToken('admin', null, $firewall, array('ROLE_ADMIN'));
        $session->set('_security_'.$firewall, serialize($token));
        $session->save();

        $cookie = new Cookie($session->getName(), $session->getId());
        $this->client->getCookieJar()->set($cookie);
    }
}
    

Note

The technique described in How to Simulate HTTP Authentication in a Functional Test is cleaner and therefore the preferred way.

This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.