Laravel Mocking

Introduction
When testing Laravel applications, you may wish to “mock” certain aspects of your application so they are not actually executed during a given test. For example, when testing a controller that dispatches an event, you may wish to mock the event listeners so they are not actually executed during the test. This allows you to only test the controller’s HTTP response without worrying about the execution of the event listeners, since the event listeners can be tested in their own test case.

Laravel provides helpers for mocking events, jobs, and facades out of the box. These helpers primarily provide a convenience layer over Mockery so you do not have to manually make complicated Mockery method calls. Of course, you are free to use Mockery or PHPUnit to create your own mocks or spies.

Bus Fake
As an alternative to mocking, you may use the Bus facade’s fake method to prevent jobs from being dispatched. When using fakes, assertions are made after the code under test is executed:

namespace Tests\Feature;
use Tests\TestCase;
use App\Jobs\ShipOrder;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Bus;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\RefreshDatabase;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\WithoutMiddleware;
class ExampleTest extends TestCase
{
    public function testOrderShipping()
    {
        Bus::fake();
        // Perform order shipping...
        Bus::assertDispatched(ShipOrder::class, function ($job) use ($order) {
            return $job->order->id === $order->id;
        });
        // Assert a job was not dispatched...
        Bus::assertNotDispatched(AnotherJob::class);
    }
}

Event Fake
As an alternative to mocking, you may use the Event facade’s fake method to prevent all event listeners from executing. You may then assert that events were dispatched and even inspect the data they received. When using fakes, assertions are made after the code under test is executed:

namespace Tests\Feature;
use Tests\TestCase;
use App\Events\OrderShipped;
use App\Events\OrderFailedToShip;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Event;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\RefreshDatabase;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\WithoutMiddleware;
class ExampleTest extends TestCase
{
    /**
     * Test order shipping.
     */
    public function testOrderShipping()
    {
        Event::fake();
        // Perform order shipping...
        Event::assertDispatched(OrderShipped::class, function ($e) use ($order) {
            return $e->order->id === $order->id;
        });
        // Assert an event was dispatched twice...
        Event::assertDispatched(OrderShipped::class, 2);
        // Assert an event was not dispatched...
        Event::assertNotDispatched(OrderFailedToShip::class);
    }
}

After calling Event::fake(), no event listeners will be executed. So, if your tests use model factories that rely on events, such as creating a UUID during a model’s creating event, you should call Event::fake() after using your factories.

public function testOrderProcess()
{
    Event::fake([
        OrderCreated::class,
    ]);

    $order = factory(Order::class)->create();

    Event::assertDispatched(OrderCreated::class);

    // Other events are dispatched as normal...
    $order->update([...]);
}

namespace Tests\Feature;

use App\Order;
use Tests\TestCase;
use App\Events\OrderCreated;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Event;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\RefreshDatabase;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\WithoutMiddleware;
class ExampleTest extends TestCase
{
    /**
     * Test order process.
     */
    public function testOrderProcess()
    {
        $order = Event::fakeFor(function () {
            $order = factory(Order::class)->create();

            Event::assertDispatched(OrderCreated::class);

            return $order;
        });

        // Events are dispatched as normal and observers will run ...
        $order->update([...]);
    }
}