Testing on Murat Useinov

Laravel 8: the interesting parts are not on the marketing page

Fri, 11 Sep 2020 23:15:00 +0300

->refundedTwice(). That is the line from Laravel 8 I care about, and it is nowhere on the release page. Jetstream gets the screenshots. Class-based factories and the queue changes get my attention, because both are about production.

Factories used to be closures registered through a global function. Now they are classes with states:

Order::factory()
    ->paid()
    ->has(OrderItem::factory()->count(3))
    ->create();

Test data quality decides test quality. Most integration suites on our project test the happy path fifty times, because the default factory returns a fresh, valid, boring record. The bugs live somewhere else. An order refunded twice. A user registered before the migration added the column. A subscription that expired in the middle of renewal. A factory state gives such a monster a name, and once the name exists, people write tests with it. Named ugly data is the cheapest test improvement I know.

Laravel Dusk and what browser tests are for

Thu, 26 Jan 2017 18:30:00 +0300

Laravel 5.4 came out on Tuesday, and the first thing I installed was Dusk. Browser tests without a Selenium server: it talks to ChromeDriver directly, the API is fluent, and a failed test leaves a screenshot behind.

My first test was the login path:

$this->browse(function ($browser) {
    $browser->visit('/login')
        ->type('email', 'user@example.com')
        ->type('password', 'secret')
        ->press('Log in')
        ->assertPathIs('/home');
});

It passed on the third run. The first run failed because the button on the test box had different text. The second failed because a JS animation was slower than the wait. This is the normal life of a browser test. It sees the real application, and the real application moves.

Run your tests on PHP 7 now

Wed, 08 Jul 2015 22:45:00 +0300

Three lines in .travis.yml. That is the whole cost of knowing in July what will break on PHP 7 in December.

php:
  - 5.6
  - nightly
matrix:
  allow_failures:
    - php: nightly

Alpha builds are out, release is planned for this autumn, and production is on 5.6 and will stay there for a while. The build stays green on 5.6. The nightly job fails quietly in the corner and produces a list of future problems while nobody is under pressure to read it.