This is the quick-start to CodeIgniter testing. Its intent is to describe what it takes to set up your system and get it ready to run unit tests. It is not intended to be a full description of the test features that you can use to test your application. Those details can be found in the documentation.
It is recommended to use the latest version of PHPUnit. At the time of this writing we are running version 9.x. Support for this has been built into the composer.json file that ships with CodeIgniter and can easily be installed via Composer if you don't already have it installed globally.
composer install
If running under macOS or Linux, you can create a symbolic link to make running tests a touch nicer.
ln -s ./vendor/bin/phpunit ./phpunit
You also need to install Xdebug in order
for code coverage to be calculated successfully. After installing Xdebug
, you must
add xdebug.mode=coverage
in the php.ini file to enable code coverage.
A number of the tests use a running database. The default configuration uses SQLite3 transient in-memory database, so it works if you can use SQLite3.
In order to change the database for testing, edit the details for the tests
group in
app/Config/Database.php or phpunit.xml or use .env file.
E.g.:
database.tests.hostname = localhost
database.tests.database = ci4_test
database.tests.username = root
database.tests.password = root
database.tests.DBDriver = MySQLi
database.tests.DBPrefix = db_
database.default.port = 3306
Make sure that you provide a database engine that is currently running on your machine.
More details on a test database setup are in the Testing Your Database section of the documentation.
If you want to run the tests without using live database you can
exclude @DatabaseLive
group. This will make the tests run quite a bit faster.
Each test class that we are running should belong to at least one Group attribute to the test class.
The available groups to use are:
Group | Purpose |
---|---|
AutoReview | Used for tests that perform automatic code reviews |
CacheLive | Used for cache tests that need external services (redis, memcached) |
DatabaseLive | Used for database tests that need to run on actual database drivers |
SeparateProcess | Used for tests that need to run on separate PHP processes |
Others | Used as a "catch-all" group for tests not falling in the above groups |
The entire test suite can be run by simply typing one command-line command from the main directory.
./phpunit
If you are using Windows, use the following command.
vendor\bin\phpunit
You can limit tests to those within a single test directory by specifying the directory name after phpunit. All core tests are stored under tests/system.
./phpunit tests/system/HTTP/
Individual tests can be run by including the relative path to the test file.
./phpunit tests/system/HTTP/RequestTest.php
You can run the tests without running the live database and the live cache tests.
./phpunit --exclude-group DatabaseLive,CacheLive
The coverage reports are generated by default after the execution of tests. These reports include a textual overview and HTML reports which can be opened in a browser.
The text file can be found at build/coverage/text/coverage.txt. The HTML files can be viewed by opening build/coverage/html/index.html in your favorite browser.
Alternatively you can use the following command:
./phpunit --colors --coverage-text=build/coverage/text/coverage.txt --coverage-html=build/coverage/html/ -d memory_limit=1024m
This runs all of the tests again collecting information about how many lines, functions, and files are tested. It also reports the percentage of the code that is covered by tests. It is collected in two formats: a simple text file that provides an overview as well as a comprehensive collection of HTML files that show the status of every line of code in the project.
The repository has a phpunit.xml.dist
file in the project root that's used for
PHPUnit configuration. This is used to provide a default configuration if you
do not have your own configuration file in the project root.
The normal practice would be to copy phpunit.xml.dist
to phpunit.xml
(which is git ignored), and to tailor it as you see fit.
For instance, you might wish to exclude database tests, or automatically generate
HTML code coverage reports.