Unit Tests

Unit tests are used to test your "business logic", which should live in classes that are independent of Symfony. For that reason, Symfony doesn't really have an opinion on what tools you use for unit testing. However, the most popular tools are PHPUnit and PHPSpec.

Functional Tests

Creating really good functional tests can be tough so some developers skip these completely. Don't skip the functional tests! By defining some simple functional tests, you can quickly spot any big errors before you deploy them:

A functional test like this is simple to implement thanks to PHPUnit data providers:

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// src/AppBundle/Tests/ApplicationAvailabilityFunctionalTest.php
namespace AppBundle\Tests;

use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Test\WebTestCase;

class ApplicationAvailabilityFunctionalTest extends WebTestCase
{
    /**
     * @dataProvider urlProvider
     */
    public function testPageIsSuccessful($url)
    {
        $client = self::createClient();
        $client->request('GET', $url);

        $this->assertTrue($client->getResponse()->isSuccessful());
    }

    public function urlProvider()
    {
        return array(
            array('/'),
            array('/posts'),
            array('/post/fixture-post-1'),
            array('/blog/category/fixture-category'),
            array('/archives'),
            // ...
        );
    }
}

This code checks that all the given URLs load successfully, which means that their HTTP response status code is between 200 and 299. This may not look that useful, but given how little effort this took, it's worth having it in your application.

In computer software, this kind of test is called smoke testing and consists of "preliminary testing to reveal simple failures severe enough to reject a prospective software release".

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public function testBlogArchives()
{
    $client = self::createClient();
    $url = $client->getContainer()->get('router')->generate('blog_archives');
    $client->request('GET', $url);

    // ...
}

Testing JavaScript Functionality

The built-in functional testing client is great, but it can't be used to test any JavaScript behavior on your pages. If you need to test this, consider using the Mink library from within PHPUnit.

Of course, if you have a heavy JavaScript frontend, you should consider using pure JavaScript-based testing tools.

Learn More about Functional Tests

Consider using the HautelookAliceBundle to generate real-looking data for your test fixtures using Faker and Alice.