Unit Testing

A solid unit test suite is essential for ongoing development in large projects, especially those with many people involved. Going back and manually testing every individual component of an application after every change is impractical. Your unit tests will help alleviate that by automatically testing your application’s components and alerting you when something is not working the same way it was when you wrote your tests.

The Zend Framework 2 API uses PHPUnit, and so does this tutorial application. A detailed explanation of unit testing is beyond the scope of this tutorial, so we will only provide sample tests for the components in the pages that follow. This tutorial assumes that you already have PHPUnit installed.

Setting up the tests directory

Start by creating a directory called tests in the project root with the following subdirectories:

zf2-tutorial/
    /tests
        /module
            /Application
                /src
                    /Application
                        /Controller

The structure of the tests directory matches exactly with that of the project’s source files, and it will allow you to keep your tests well-organized and easy to find. Later, you will create the proper directories to test your models, but right now there is only the IndexController for the Application module.

Bootstrapping your tests

Next, create a file called phpunit.xml under zf-tutorial/tests/:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<phpunit bootstrap="bootstrap.php">
    <testsuites>
        <testsuite name="zf2tutorial">
            <directory>./</directory>
        </testsuite>
    </testsuites>
</phpunit>

And a file called bootstrap.php, also under zf-tutorial/tests/:

chdir(dirname(__DIR__));

include __DIR__ . '/../init_autoloader.php';

The contents of the bootstrap file are similar to those of zf-tutorial/public/index.php, except we don’t initialize the application. We’ll be doing that in our tests to ensure that each test is executed against a freshly initialized instance of our application without any previous tests influencing the current test’s results.

Your first Controller test

Next, create IndexControllerTest.php under zf-tutorial/tests/module/Application/src/Application/Controller with the following contents:

<?php

namespace Application\Controller;

use Application\Controller\IndexController;
use Zend\Http\Request;
use Zend\Http\Response;
use Zend\Mvc\MvcEvent;
use Zend\Mvc\Router\RouteMatch;
use PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase;

class IndexControllerTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
    protected $controller;
    protected $request;
    protected $response;
    protected $routeMatch;
    protected $event;

    protected function setUp()
    {
        $bootstrap        = \Zend\Mvc\Application::init(include 'config/application.config.php');
        $this->controller = new IndexController();
        $this->request    = new Request();
        $this->routeMatch = new RouteMatch(array('controller' => 'index'));
        $this->event      = $bootstrap->getMvcEvent();
        $this->event->setRouteMatch($this->routeMatch);
        $this->controller->setEvent($this->event);
        $this->controller->setEventManager($bootstrap->getEventManager());
        $this->controller->setServiceLocator($bootstrap->getServiceManager());
    }
}

Here, we expand a bit on the setup in Tom Oram’s Unit Testing a ZF 2 Controller blog entry by initializing our application in the setUp() method and setting the EventManager and ServiceLocator directly on the controller. This isn’t important right now, but we’ll need it later on when writing more advanced tests.

Now, add the following function to the IndexControllerTest class:

public function testIndexActionCanBeAccessed()
{
    $this->routeMatch->setParam('action', 'index');

    $result   = $this->controller->dispatch($this->request);
    $response = $this->controller->getResponse();

    $this->assertEquals(200, $response->getStatusCode());
    $this->assertInstanceOf('Zend\View\Model\ViewModel', $result);
}

The test is verifying that the homepage responds with HTTP status code 200 and that the controller’s return value is an instance of Zend\View\Model\ViewModel.

Testing

Finally, cd to zf-tutorial/tests/ and run phpunit. If you see something like this, then your application is ready for more tests!

PHPUnit 3.5.15 by Sebastian Bergmann.

.

Time: 0 seconds, Memory: 5.75Mb

OK (1 test, 2 assertions)