How to test Laravel applications

The Testing Laravel video course, created by Spatie, is the best way to learn how to create a quality test suite for your application. Even if you already know the basics of testing, the course contains many cool tips and tricks to sharpen your testing skills.

#What is a test?

A test is a little function or script that executes some part of your application. In that script, you will also verify whether the result of that execution matches what you were expecting.

Here's a little example. Don't worry if you don't understand everything yet. We'll explain everything in the course.

it('can handle a form submission', function() {
    $url = route('blogPost.create');
 
    $values = [
        'email' => 'john@example.com',
        'name' => 'My name',
    ];
 
    post($url, $values)->assertSuccessful();
 
    assertDatabaseHas(BlogPost::class, $values);
});

#The benefits of testing

The most significant benefit of having a test suite is that it will give you confidence that everything is working correctly without testing everything manually.

When coding up functionality, such as a form submission, you can write a test (like the one in the snippet above). This test can be used to verify if your form is working correctly.

There are many other benefits. In this blog post, we share more thoughts on the benefits of testing.

#What you'll learn in this course

In this course, we'll teach you best practices for testing Laravel applications. You'll learn how to test from scratch. And even if you already know these basics of testing, the course contains cool tips and tricks to sharpen your testing skills.

We'll cover how to make sure your homepage works, how you can test form submissions, what the different types of tests are, and much more!

Pest is the new kid on the block in the PHP testing world that focuses on stellar developer experience. It's rapidly rising in popularity, and we believe it'll only grow in the near future. That's why we've recorded our entire course twice: first with PHPUnit, then with Pest and all the awesome features it has to offer.

You can see the entire outline on the Testing Laravel website.

#A few example videos

In this sample video, we'll show how to test a simple form.

And here's one that shows you a couple of ways to test a middleware class.

#Get testing tips for free

Along with the course, we've also started a newsletter called Testing Tidbits. You can subscribe to the newsletter to get daily testing tips.

#Taking it even further

For those interested in not only testing, but also in creating solid web applications from scratch, we bundled Testing Laravel with our best-seller Laravel Beyond CRUD.

With both courses, you'll learn how to build, test and maintain larger-than-average Laravel applications.

When purchasing our Solid Applications Bundle you'll get a 20% discount on the grand total of these courses.

#More stuff by these wizards

You might already know Spatie from their countless Laravel packages that they've created over the years.

Be sure to also check out the other products and courses by Spatie:

• Ray: a desktop app to debug apps faster
• Mailcoach: a self-hosted platform to send newsletters affordably
• Flare: the best exception tracker for Laravel apps
• Media Library Pro: upload components for Laravel
• Laravel Beyond CRUD: learn how to build larger-than-average Laravel applications
• Front Line PHP: writing order apps with PHP 8
• Event Sourcing in Laravel
• Laravel Package Training