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Toast\Unit

Toast is a super-simple testing framework for PHP, inspired by Javascript testing frameworks like Karma, Jasmine etc.

Toast was born out of frustration with existing testing frameworks which (in our view) are needlessly bulky, complex and difficult to setup. Some are also excruciatingly slow (looking at you, PHPUnit).

Features

• Very fast
• Assertions using native PHP assert
• Feature descriptions using DocComments
• Grouping of related tests

Installation

Create a Toast.json config file in the root of your project. It should contain at least a "tests" key pointing to the directory where you've placed your tests. Tests may be placed in (sub)directories; Toast will recurse.

Optionally the config can also contain a "bootstrap" key with an array of files to include prior to running. These can contain your project's setup (e.g. dependency injection logic).

Turn on assertions and configure them to throw AssertionError on failure. See this section in the manual; both values should be set to 1.

Configuration

Place a configuration file in de root of your project (or optionally specify it as a parameter when running Toast). The file supports all formats Kingconf supports; we'll use JSON here.

An example config file:

Yep, that's it :)

Usage

That's it :) You may optionally speficy a --filter= parameter containing a regular expression. In that case only tests with matching file names will be run. Filters are case-insensitive and "@" is used as a delimiter.

Other optional flags are:

• -v for verbose mode
• -o for output mode (see below)

Writing tests

This couldn't be simpler! Each test(group) is a callable. Toast assumes any callable returning a Generator is a group; other callables are the actual tests. For example:

You can have as many assertions per test as you like, but typically it is best practice to limit yourself to as little as possible (preferably one) and group related tests using a generator:

Nesting can go as deep as makes sense for your project.

Setup

The test callables are invoked with $this bound to the actual test instance (an instance of Toast\Unit\Test). This exposes a beforeEach method accepting a callable to be called before each test in that group (tests in a nested group do not inherit them). Multiple calls to beforeEach can be made.

In the above example, "1" will get output twice since the beforeEach is valid for the two top-level yields. "2" will be ouptut once since it only applies to the nested yield, which in turn knows nothing about its parent.

You can use beforeEach to e.g. load a database fixture. How you do that is up to you.

Teardown

Similarly, if you need to teardown there is an afterEach method that works the same way.

Cap'n obvious here, but both beforeEach as well as afterEach will only apply to tests getting yielded after the respective calls. This is because PHP halts execution internally inside a generator. For complex tests it might make sense to add before/after callables mid-group, but usually you should just place them at the beginning. If you find yourself needing to add them mid-group, it's usually a sign you should break up your test group into smaller units.

Testing other things than simple assertions

Toast assumes a succesfull test is a passed assertion. But what it you need to test if something throws an exception? Simple:

Toast also assumes a test does not yield output. So to test if a function actually does yield output, use output buffering:

You can optionally specify the -o parameter when invoking Toast to turn this feature off. This eases development since you can more easily var_dump stuff until you get a working test.

Detecting a Toast run

Toast sets an environment variable TOAST your code can check for, e.g. to know which database you want to use (development or test):

There is also a (unique) TOAST_CLIENT set you can use to identify a particular run of Toast. This would be useful if e.g. your tested feature stores something somewhere you would need to be able to identify.