Laravel Testing - Should I be creating dependant resources in each test? - laravel

Question

Starting on a new build with Laravel Spark 6 (Laravel 5.6) and decided to give TDD a try.
First test was lovely, I created a unit test to make sure that users can create an team.
(Pseudo code):
class AddNewTeamTest extends TestCase
{
/** #test */
public function admin_can_create_new_team()
{
// Create a user account
$data = [
// Information for tea,
];
$response = $this->withHeaders([
'X-Requested-With' => 'XMLHttpRequest',
])
->actingAs($user)
->json('POST', '/api/teams', $data);
$response
->assertStatus(201);
}
}
Using this in TDD style was a nice process, but now I want to be able to write a test for adding a member to that team.
It seems backwards that in this new test, I would run all of the code in my first test. Is there anyway around this? For the new test I would need a user and team already created before I could test adding a user to that team..
Any links or advice welcome!

Answer 1

You can use function setUp() and build your enviroment inside it.
So your class should looks like that:
class AddNewTeamTest extends TestCase
{
protected function setUp()
{
// Create a user account
// Create your enviroment, etc.
$this->actingAs($user)
}
/** #test */
public function admin_can_create_new_team()
{
$data = [
// Information for tea,
];
$response = $this->withHeaders([
'X-Requested-With' => 'XMLHttpRequest',
])
->json('POST', '/api/teams', $data);
$response
->assertStatus(201);
}
public function testAnother()
{
\\your next test
}
}
If you need a team in next few cases, that should be added in setUp().
Also, you can make your next test needed ypur previous one. In that case you can return something in admin_can_create_new_team() and take as parameter in testAnother()
More info:
https://phpunit.de/manual/current/en/writing-tests-for-phpunit.html#writing-tests-for-phpunit.test-dependencies