Testing Partial JSON Responses with Laravel

February 21, 2017 / Eric L. Barnes

Laravel provides many useful helpers for testing your application and it has great support for testing HTTP testing through its fluent API.

A feature added to v5.4.10 is a new assertJsonFragment method that allows you to look for a specific fragment instead of the whole JSON response.

Here is a quick example to show how this can work. Let’s say your app has a way to fetch information on a specific user:

Route::get('/api/users', function() {
    return App\User::all();
});

This returns the JSON for all the users:

// /api/user/
[
    {"id":1,"name":"Bill Murray","email":"bill.murray@example.org","created_at":"2017-02-14 01:53:04","updated_at":"2017-02-14 01:53:04"},
    {"id":2,"name":"John Doe","email":"john.doe@example.org","created_at":"2017-02-14 02:23:14","updated_at":"2017-02-14 02:23:14"}
]

Now with the new assertJsonFrament you can test it like this:

/** @test */
function test_json_response()
{
    $response = $this->json('GET', '/api/user/1');

    $response
        ->assertStatus(200)
        ->assertJsonFragment([
            'name' => 'Bill Murray',
        ]);
}

This is just another small tool available in your arsenal to make testing easier. Check out the documentation for other methods of testing JSON responses.