CodeIgniter Testing Guide: Beginners' Guide to Automated Testing in PHP

Who Should Read This Book?

This book is for PHP developers who don't know Automated Testing or Unit Testing, or for those looking for help testing CodeIgniter applications.

If one or more of the lines below sounds familiar, this book is perfect for you!

I have never written test code.
I want to write test code, but I don't know how.
I tried to write test code in the past, but I couldn't quite figure it out.
Table of Contents

Chapter 1: What is Automated Testing?

Let's begin learning about automated testing. First we will explore the basic concepts of automated testing. We will find out why and what you should test. At the same time, I will explain the ideas and testing policies used by this book.

Chapter 2: Setting Up the Testing Environment

To run tests in your PHP environment, you will need to install some additional software. For this book, this includes CodeIgniter, PHPUnit and a tool which acts as a bridge between them, ci-phpunit-test.

Chapter 3: Test Jargon

We define test jargon here. One of the annoying and confusing things in testing is the new vocabulary required to understand it. By the end of this chapter we'll help you understand the difference between Unit, Integration, and System testing; Functional and Acceptance testing; Fixtures and Mocks; and more.

Chapter 4: PHPUnit Basics

IIn this chapter, we will learn the basics of PHPUnit. We will run PHPUnit and learn how to configure it. After that, we will study PHPUnit conventions and write our first test. We also cover PHPUnit functionality, data providers, fixtures, and assertions.

Chapter 5: Testing a Simple MVC Application

You've already learned how to write test code, so here we will write tests for a CodeIgniter Tutorial application. We will write tests for a controller and a model. In this chapter, we will use the database for model testing.

Chapter 6: Unit Testing for Models

We will learn more about testing models. We will write tests for models without using the database. To do this, we will learn about PHPUnit mock objects.

Chapter 7: Testing Controllers

We will learn more about testing controllers in this and the next two chapters. In this chapter, we will write tests for a controller for reviewing, and write tests with mocking models. We also will write test cases for authentication and redirects.

Chapter 8: Unit Testing CLI Controllers

We will continue learning to write tests for controllers. In this chapter, we will write unit tests for controllers, and learn about monkey patching.

Chapter 9: Testing REST Controllers

In this chapter, we will learn about testing REST controllers. You will learn how to send (emulate) requests with methods other than GET and POST.

Chapter 10: Browser Testing with Codeception

In previous chapters, we have been using PHPUnit. In this chapter, we will learn about another testing tool. We will install Codeception, learn to configure it, and write tests which work with the web browser.