Database Testing

Introduction

Laravel provides a variety of helpful tools and assertions to make it easier to test your database driven applications. In addition, Laravel model factories and seeders make it painless to create test database records using your application's Eloquent models and relationships. We'll discuss all of these powerful features in the following documentation.

Resetting The Database After Each Test

Before proceeding much further, let's discuss how to reset your database after each of your tests so that data from a previous test does not interfere with subsequent tests. Laravel's included Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\RefreshDatabase trait will take care of this for you. Simply use the trait on your test class:

<?php

namespace Tests\Feature;

use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\RefreshDatabase;
use Tests\TestCase;

class ExampleTest extends TestCase
{
    use RefreshDatabase;

    /**
     * A basic functional test example.
     */
    public function test_basic_example(): void
    {
        $response = $this->get('/');

        // ...
    }
}

The Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\RefreshDatabase trait does not migrate your database if your schema is up to date. Instead, it will only execute the test within a database transaction. Therefore, any records added to the database by test cases that do not use this trait may still exist in the database.

If you would like to totally reset the database, you may use the Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\DatabaseMigrations or Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\DatabaseTruncation traits instead. However, both of these options are significantly slower than the RefreshDatabase trait.

Model Factories

When testing, you may need to insert a few records into your database before executing your test. Instead of manually specifying the value of each column when you create this test data, Laravel allows you to define a set of default attributes for each of your Eloquent models using model factories.

To learn more about creating and utilizing model factories to create models, please consult the complete model factory documentation. Once you have defined a model factory, you may utilize the factory within your test to create models:

use App\Models\User;

public function test_models_can_be_instantiated(): void
{
    $user = User::factory()->create();

    // ...
}

Running Seeders

If you would like to use database seeders to populate your database during a feature test, you may invoke the seed method. By default, the seed method will execute the DatabaseSeeder, which should execute all of your other seeders. Alternatively, you pass a specific seeder class name to the seed method:

<?php

namespace Tests\Feature;

use Database\Seeders\OrderStatusSeeder;
use Database\Seeders\TransactionStatusSeeder;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\RefreshDatabase;
use Tests\TestCase;

class ExampleTest extends TestCase
{
    use RefreshDatabase;

    /**
     * Test creating a new order.
     */
    public function test_orders_can_be_created(): void
    {
        // Run the DatabaseSeeder...
        $this->seed();

        // Run a specific seeder...
        $this->seed(OrderStatusSeeder::class);

        // ...

        // Run an array of specific seeders...
        $this->seed([
            OrderStatusSeeder::class,
            TransactionStatusSeeder::class,
            // ...
        ]);
    }
}

Alternatively, you may instruct Laravel to automatically seed the database before each test that uses the RefreshDatabase trait. You may accomplish this by defining a $seed property on your base test class:

<?php

namespace Tests;

use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\TestCase as BaseTestCase;

abstract class TestCase extends BaseTestCase
{
    use CreatesApplication;

    /**
     * Indicates whether the default seeder should run before each test.
     *
     * @var bool
     */
    protected $seed = true;
}

When the $seed property is true, the test will run the Database\Seeders\DatabaseSeeder class before each test that uses the RefreshDatabase trait. However, you may specify a specific seeder that should be executed by defining a $seeder property on your test class:

use Database\Seeders\OrderStatusSeeder;

/**
 * Run a specific seeder before each test.
 *
 * @var string
 */
protected $seeder = OrderStatusSeeder::class;

Available Assertions

Laravel provides several database assertions for your PHPUnit feature tests. We'll discuss each of these assertions below.

assertDatabaseCount

Assert that a table in the database contains the given number of records:

$this->assertDatabaseCount('users', 5);

assertDatabaseHas

Assert that a table in the database contains records matching the given key / value query constraints:

$this->assertDatabaseHas('users', [
    'email' => 'sally@example.com',
]);

assertDatabaseMissing

Assert that a table in the database does not contain records matching the given key / value query constraints:

$this->assertDatabaseMissing('users', [
    'email' => 'sally@example.com',
]);

assertSoftDeleted

The assertSoftDeleted method may be used to assert a given Eloquent model has been "soft deleted":

$this->assertSoftDeleted($user);

assertNotSoftDeleted

The assertNotSoftDeleted method may be used to assert a given Eloquent model hasn't been "soft deleted":

$this->assertNotSoftDeleted($user);

assertModelExists

Assert that a given model exists in the database:

use App\Models\User;

$user = User::factory()->create();

$this->assertModelExists($user);

assertModelMissing

Assert that a given model does not exist in the database:

use App\Models\User;

$user = User::factory()->create();

$user->delete();

$this->assertModelMissing($user);

expectsDatabaseQueryCount

The expectsDatabaseQueryCount method may be invoked at the beginning of your test to specify the total number of database queries that you expect to be run during the test. If the actual number of executed queries does not exactly match this expectation, the test will fail:

$this->expectsDatabaseQueryCount(5);

// Test...
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