Laravel 5.4 / updated: February 21, 2017

Testing Partial JSON Responses with Laravel

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.