This document summarizes a presentation about testing APIs built with Laravel. It discusses testing API concepts in Laravel, including testing models, database interactions, HTTP requests, responses, and validation. It provides examples of building an API for user groups, events, and venues using Laravel resources, requests, and testing methods like assertStatus and assertJson. The goal is to gradually build out the API with tests to ensure functionality without using an API client.

1. Test Driven APIs with Laravel
@michaelpeacock

2. What’s in store?
• Look at API concepts within Laravel
• Look at testing concepts within Laravel
• How we can gradually build an API with confidence in its functionality,
without ever opening an API client

3. @michaelpeacock
• Organiser of PHP North East
• Occasional author and speaker
• Freelance developer
• Consultant CTO for early stage SaaS start-ups

4. Laravel APIs

5. Lots for free
• Models & Collections > JSON Responses automatically
• Validation Failures > JSON Responses automatically
• Automatic handling of request and response headers (content-type,
etc)

6. Lots to of power to customise
• API Resources
• API Routing
• Resource Controllers
• API Resource Controllers

7. Laravel Tests

8. Database interaction
• RefreshDatabase: calls migrate:fresh (drops all tables and re-migrates)
• DatabaseTransactions: wraps test db calls in a transaction

9. HTTP Tests

10. Sample project
• API for user group
• Events
• Venues
• Talks

11. Model Integration Tests

12. Model integration tests
• A good starting point
• Give us confidence that models, migrations, relations and factories
are setup correctly
• Especially important if we are providing custom field names for
relations, or working with models outside of the root app directory
• Factories are important for API tests, so its good that we test the basis
setup before we move onto that.
• Inspired by Amo Chohan: 12 tried and tested top tips for better
testing

13. Key things to test initially
• We can instantiate the class
• Any relations

18. Migrations

19. Tip: Name your migrations well

21. Models

22. Factories

24. API Setup

25. Making requests
• $this->json(method, uri, data, headers)
• $this->getJson / postJson / patchJson / deleteJson
• $this->get(url, headers)
• $this->post(url, data, headers)

26. Testing responses: Status Codes
• $response->assertStatus(status code)
• $response->assertSuccessful()
• $response->assertOk()
• $response->assertNotFound()
• $response->assertNotFound()
• $response->assertForbidden()

27. GET /talks

29. API Controllers
php artisan make:controller Api/EventsController --model=Event --api

30. API Routing

33. Testing response data
• $response->assertExactJson(array)
• $response->assertJson(array)
• $response->assertJsonCount(array)
• $response->assertJsonFragment(array)
• $response->assertJsonMissing(array)
• $response->assertJsonMissingExact(array)
• $response->assertJsonStructure(array)

34. Testing headers
• $response->assertHeader(header, value)
• $response->assertHeaderMissing(header)
• $response->assertLocation(url) // Location header

35. Lets check we get a JSON response…

40. Better responses
• Venue name and description should be included
• Event id should not be included
• Start and end date should be formatted a specific way

45. Now we get some failing (not erroring) tests

46. Resources
php artisan make:resource Event
php artisan make:resource Venue

49. Passing tests again!

50. POST /events
• We now want to test creating an event

51. A test helper to build valid request data

54. Saving a new event

55. Status codes and Resources

57. Testing Validation
• $response->assertJsonMissingValidationErrors(array)
• $response->assertJsonValidationErrors()

59. Creating a new request
php artisan make:request CreateEventRequest

61. Use the request

63. Authenticating

64. actingAs

65. Thank you
• https://github.com/mkpeacock/talk-test-driven-apis-with-laravel