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Phalcon Talon

Test harness and Phalcon bootstrapping for PHPUnit and beyond - the part of Phalcon that catches the bugs.

Talon provides framework-neutral traits (the core), ready-to-extend PHPUnit base classes, and a one-liner bootstrap so any Phalcon project can write unit, integration, and functional tests with minimal boilerplate.

Requirements

• PHP ^8.1
• Phalcon - either the ext-phalcon C extension (^5) or the phalcon/phalcon PHP implementation (^6). Talon detects whichever is present.

Install

Bootstrap (one-liner)

Need setup hooks (the old loadIni / loadFolders)? Use the bootstrap runner:

Unit tests

AbstractUnitTestCase gives you callProtectedMethod(), getProtectedProperty(), setProtectedProperty(), invokeMethod(), getNewFileName(), safeDeleteFile(), safeDeleteDirectory(), assertFileContentsContains(), checkExtensionIsLoaded(), and checkPhalconAvailable().

Database tests

The driver comes from the driver env (sqlite, mysql, mariadb, pgsql); credentials come from Settings (env vars by default - see resources/.env.example).

Schema fixtures

A schema fixture declares one table's DDL per dialect. Talon generates the SQL dumps from them; your tests use the same classes to truncate and populate.

The three per-dialect methods are abstract on purpose - a new dialect cannot be silently forgotten. There is no mariadb method: MariaDB uses the MySQL dialect.

• Creation statements only. Do not write a DROP TABLE yourself; the generator prepends one from the table name.
• An empty list means the table does not exist in that dialect. It is skipped entirely, drop included, and gets no manifest entry.
• getDependencies() returns the table names that must exist first. Override it when the table carries a foreign key.
• insert() is yours. The contract covers the lifecycle - create(), drop(), clear() - never the data shape, so each fixture types its own insert signature.

Generating the artifacts

Configure it with these settings (env vars, or keys in Settings::fromArray()):

Each dialect gets its own directory:

The manifest is generated, never hand-edited - if it is wrong, fix a fixture class and regenerate.

Point dump_file at the dialect directory and AbstractDatabaseTestCase loads it on the first connection: pre-schema, the manifest's tables in order, then post-schema.

loadSchema() also still accepts a single flat .sql file, so a project can migrate to the directory format on its own schedule.

Rebuilding one table

Loading the whole schema once and truncating stays the default - fast, ordered, dependency-safe. addTable() is the escape hatch for a test that needs one table rebuilt:

It is standalone only, and enforced: a table's declared dependencies must already exist, or it throws SchemaDependencyMissing naming the missing one. Call it once per table, dependency first. The strictness is deliberate - schema_pre is live only during the bulk load, so a table with foreign keys that loads fine in bulk can fail standalone on MySQL for reasons nothing at the call site suggests.

Functional tests

The package never owns your container - hand it your configured application:

Browser tests

For multi-request flows - login, forms, redirects - AbstractBrowserTestCase drives your app in-process (no web server) through a symfony/browser-kit bridge, keeping cookies and the session across requests:

Verbs: visitPage, fillField, selectOption, clickLink, pressButton, getCookie/setCookie; assertions: assertPageContainsText / assertPageMissingText. Redirects are followed automatically. Needs symfony/browser-kit + symfony/dom-crawler.

Service tests (Redis / Memcached)

Service tests skip automatically when the backend is unreachable.

Mocking a Resultset (no database)

Custom configuration

Override getSettings() in a project base class, or pass Settings::fromArray([...]) to Talon::boot():

Command line runner

vendor/bin/talon fronts PHPUnit per mapped suite:

With zero configuration, suites are discovered from phpunit*.xml files in the project root and resources/ (phpunit.mysql.xml becomes mysql; phpunit.xml.dist becomes unit, the default). Projects that need php ini flags or env vars declare a talon.php at the project root:

Per-suite keys: config (required), php (extra ini flags), env (extra env vars) and args (default PHPUnit arguments) - suite entries merge over the global php/env. Options are forwarded to PHPUnit starting at the first option talon does not recognize itself, and everything after -- is always forwarded verbatim:

Each suite runs as its own subprocess (per-suite extensions and env vars work), a single suite's exit code is forwarded verbatim, and multiple suites exit with the maximum code after a per-suite summary.

Beyond PHPUnit

The traits are the core public API and carry no PHPUnit base-class requirement for their non-assertion helpers, so Pest (uses(...)) and other runners can consume them too. Pest and Codeception adapters are planned for a future release.

Contributing

Talon is developed entirely in Docker - see CONTRIBUTING.md for the full local-development guide. The short version:

License

BSD-3-Clause. See LICENSE.