REST APIs are widely used in modern web development to allow communication between different web applications. Laravel, a popular PHP framework, provides robust tools for creating and testing REST APIs. Feature testing for REST APIs is essential to the development process as it helps ensure that your APIs are functioning as intended. This blog post will discuss how you can do feature testing for REST APIs in Laravel.

What is Laravel Feature Testing and How Does It Work?

Model-view-controller (MVC) architecture is used by the PHP web application framework Laravel. When you mention API testing you mean testing our application’s API layer. Dusk is a package from Laravel that is used to test REST APIs.

By reading this article, you may learn more about feature testing in Laravel, its importance, and how to include it in your project. Black box testing, often known as feature testing, determines whether an application feature performs as intended.

What does Feature Testing in Laravel Require?

By mimicking and mocking user interaction, feature testing allows you to determine whether your code functions as expected. It uses the BDD (Behavior-Driven Development) ideas, in which every feature is tested independently of the others. Because the code can be unit tested and run without requiring access to a database or other services running on a different server, this helps you build more dependable and maintainable code.

There are Two Key Components to Feature Testing

Creating a test case to verify the functionality of your application is the first step. The second component is an assertion that demonstrates the functionality of the feature. Here’s an illustration: Imagine you have a program that shows some text on the screen when a button is clicked. To test this capability, you must create a test case to determine whether the text was displayed after pressing the button.

Also, Read User Interface and Database Integration Using Selenium WebDriver

Why do People Utilize Laravel Feature Testing?

REST APIs are widely used apps that offer data or services to other applications. Because they enable integration with other applications, these APIs are frequently the most critical component of a program. These APIs must continuously deliver the correct data or service and perform as intended as they are being developed. Yet, there must be a few tests for this to be simple.

We can easily test our REST endpoints thanks to Laravel Feature Testing, ensuring they always function properly. Their key advantage is that feature tests are independent of the code. You don’t have to worry about damaging other system components if you quickly fix a flaw detected in one of the tests.

How Does Feature Testing Work in Laravel?

The syntax for feature tests in Laravel is the same as that for controllers and other classes. You have the same tools and options available to you. By employing this syntax, you may write tests that are clear, simple to read, and easy to comprehend without having to dig into the source code being tested. You can conduct feature tests in your application using any common PHP testing framework, such as PHPUnit or PHPSpec.

There are two methods in the FeatureTest class: setup() and run (). The run() method executes each test case, whereas thesetup() method is executed before each test. These two techniques specify the tests you wish to run and the tests themselves.

Build a CRUD Business Logic Route and the API

You must first develop a business logic system that can manage all of our requests. The business logic will handle creating models, retrieving records, and carrying out CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) actions. It is a common approach to modeling a database’s operations.

Also, Read How to optimize Continuous Delivery with Continuous Reliability

1. Step 1: Build a New Route in

   When someone visits your website, routes are the code instructing your program on which page to load. You may use route tests in Laravel 5 to determine whether particular routes will return specific data depending on the information given in the URL request. This testing approach will also be used for our API routes.

2. Step 2: Get information out of a database

   In this scenario, you would want all the information for a specific user. The first argument for this method is a name, and the second is an array of arguments. If you don’t need any parameters, you can pass an empty array since the parameters are optional. Moreover, you can instruct Laravel to return all those objects using a single parameter.

3. Step 3: Update current database records

   To update current database records, you must first specify the endpoints handling each request before implementing CRUD in your API.
   You can begin by creating our foundation controllers and routes. Laravel typically utilizes controller classes with names that start with the “Api” suffix. This is frequently used to distinguish between the controller in charge of handling requests for your front-end application and the controller in charge of handling requests for your API.

4. Step 4: Eliminate data from a database

   Two steps are taken to execute the code that deletes rows from the database: Any Eloquent model you intend to delete must first have its delete method called. The record ID should then be passed to this procedure as an argument. Second, you instruct Laravel to delete these records from the database using the flush method on the database connection.

   Add a feature test to your Laravel program. Your application can test your code before you commit it by implementing feature tests. When new features are implemented, this helps stop problems from being introduced into your program. RESTful APIs have become commonplace.

   They are simple to utilize and put into action. The fact that they are simple to implement is one of the main justifications. Another benefit is that they give developers a wonderful way to interact with other applications, which makes it simpler for them to make apps. The Laravel framework provides some tools for efficiently creating RESTful APIs. Also, it gives a sizable selection of artisan commands that enable you to easily evaluate the operation of your application.

Conclusion

Whether you are developing a service layer or an API in Laravel, consider incorporating feature testing while evaluating your server-side code. Instead of depending on the testing framework Ember’s acceptance test harness offers, test the functionality of your application by stumbling routes, controllers, and models while in development. This is especially important in server-side microservice architectures that need testing and deploying numerous services.