Laravel Feature Testing: Call an external HTTP Request only once - laravel

Question

I have a login function that needs to be called from a separate User Service API.
The sole purpose of logging in is to be used on testing, because I need to get the bearer token that will be used as the parameter for one of my middleware.
As for the testing, is it possible to call external api thru HTTP Request only once? If so, where should I put it?
I tried it on the setUp() function but it seems to be called every time a test function is executed on the test class, making the test slow.
EDITED with Code:
The test code:
<?php
namespace Tests\Feature\Controllers;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\RefreshDatabase;
use PHPUnit\Framework\TestSuite;
use Tests\TestCase;
class MyTest extends TestCase
{
protected string $bearerToken;
public function setUp(): void
{
parent::setUp();
$this->bearerToken = self::getToken();
}
protected static function getToken()
{
$response = Http::post('http://auth_api/oauth/token', [
...
...
]);
// but assume that this request always succeed.
if ($response->failed()) return [];
return json_decode(json_encode($response->json()), true)['access_token'];
}
...test methods here
}
I also tried doing manual flagging, so that the custom login function will only be fetched once throughout the whole test suite.
like below:
protected static $isInitiated = false;
protected string $bearerToken;
public function setUp(): void
{
parent::setUp();
if (! self::$isInitiated) {
$this->bearerToken = self::getToken();
self::$isInitiated = true;
}
}
Based on the answer here
but it gives me error saying:
$bearerToken must not be accessed before initialization
So, from that error, the test methods must've been executed first before it even gave value to $bearerToken.
I also tried public static function setUpBeforeClass():
protected static ?string $bearerToken = null;
public static function setUpBeforeClass(): void
{
self::$bearerToken = self::getToken();
}
But it also gives me error saying:
A facade root has not been set.
Is there any way to do this?

Answer 1

You shouldn't call any external api in testing, the reason why is simple, You are testing the app you or your team coded, not someone else.
So, you should mocking all external parts like use Http::fake().
Http::fake([
// Stub a JSON response for GitHub endpoints...
'github.com/*' => Http::response(['foo' => 'bar'], 200, $headers),
// Stub a string response for Google endpoints...
'google.com/*' => Http::response('Hello World', 200, $headers),
]);
Here is document: https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/http-client#faking-responses
And if you really want to call external api, new a GuzzleClient, then you can do what you want, but you should realize that is not a good idea.
$client = new GuzzleHttp\Client();
$res = $client->request('GET', 'https://api.github.com/user', [
'auth' => ['user', 'pass']
]);
echo $res->getStatusCode();
// "200"
echo $res->getHeader('content-type')[0];
// 'application/json; charset=utf8'
echo $res->getBody();
// {"type":"User"...'