Tests

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Roughly speaking, there are two types of test. Unit testing allows you to test the input and output of specific functions. Functional testing allows you to command a "browser" where you browse to pages on your site, click links, fill out forms and assert that you see certain things on the page.

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:

Best Practice

Define a functional test that at least checks if your application pages are successfully loading.

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

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

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 [
            ['/'],
            ['/posts'],
            ['/post/fixture-post-1'],
            ['/blog/category/fixture-category'],
            ['/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".

Hardcode URLs in a Functional Test

Some of you may be asking why the previous functional test doesn't use the URL generator service:

Best Practice

Hardcode the URLs used in the functional tests instead of using the URL generator.

Consider the following functional test that uses the router service to generate the URL of the tested page:

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

    // ...
}

This will work, but it has one huge drawback. If a developer mistakenly changes the path of the blog_archives route, the test will still pass, but the original (old) URL won't work! This means that any bookmarks for that URL will be broken and you'll lose any search engine page ranking.

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.

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.

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