Do This First When Unit Testing in Laravel

If you are writing phpunit and the Laravel PHP framework, (I know, who writes unit tests in PHP), and extending Laravel’s “TestCase” I recommend the first thing that you do when writing a new test class is write the following setUp and tearDown methods.

class FakeTest extends TestCase{
    public function setUp(){
        parent::setUp();
    }
    public function tearDown(){
        parent::tearDown();
        Mockery::close();
    }
}

I haven’t looked deeply into the source of what is happening in the parent setUp and tearDown methods but in tests that I am not doing this I have noticed very flaky behavior.

The other line not mentioned yet is the “Mockery::close()”. This is another very important call to make if you are using Mockery. I believe this also was the cause of weird behavior that has made my tests fail in other parts of the code that I wasn’t even working on. I believe what is happening here is the same type is being mocked across two different test cases and the property values are invalidating expecations. Even though I am not sure what is happening under the hood yet, I know adding the example code would have saved me some headaches.

I hope this can save someone a little time.

04 August 2014