Using Nette Tester with ProcessWire

[tpr]

Update 2018-07-09: ProcessNetteTester module is available in the Modules Directory and on GitHub.

This is a short tutorial on how to use Nette Tester with ProcessWire.

As you will see it's very easy to setup and use and it's perfect for testing your code's functionality. With bootstrapping ProcessWire it's also possible to check the rendered markup of pages using the API, checking page properties, etc. It's also a great tool for module developers for writing better code. 

While there will be nothing extraordinary here that you couldn't find in Tester's docs this can serve as a good starting point.

Prerequisites: PHP 5.6+

01 Download Tester

Go to https://github.com/nette/tester/releases and download the latest release (currently 2.0.2). Download from the link reading "Source code (zip)". You can use composer also if you wish.

02 Extract Tester files

Create a new directory in your site root called "tester". Extract the zip downloaded here, so it should look like this:

/site
/tester/src
/tester/tools
/tester/appveyor.yml
/tester/composer.json
/tester/contributing.md
/tester/license.md
/tester/readme.md
/wire
...

03 Create directory for test files

Add a new directory in "/tester" called "tests". Tester recognizes "*.Test.php" and "*.phpt" files in the tests directory, recursively. 

04 Create your first test

In the "tests" directory create a new "MyTest.php" file.

The first test is a very simple one that bootstraps ProcessWire and checks if the Home page name is "Home". This is not the smartest test but will show you the basics.

Add this to "/tester/tests/MyTest.php":

<?php namespace ProcessWire;

use \Tester\Assert;
use \Tester\DomQuery;
use \Tester\TestCase;
use \Tester\Environment;

require __DIR__ . '/../src/bootstrap.php'; // load Tester
require __DIR__ . '/../../index.php'; // bootstrap ProcessWire

Environment::setup();

class MyTest extends TestCase
{
    // first test (step 04)
    public function testHomeTitle()
    {
        $expected = 'Home'; // we expect the page title to be "Home"
        $actual = wire('pages')->get(1)->title; // check what's the actual title
        Assert::equal($expected, $actual); // check whether they are equal
    }

    // second test will go here (step 06)
    // third test will go here (step 07)
}

// run testing methods
(new MyTest())->run();

I've added comment placeholders for the second and third tests that we will insert later.

05 Run Tester

Tester can be run either from the command line or from the browser. The command line output is more verbose and colored while in the browser it's plain text only (see later).

Running from the command line

Navigate to the "/tester" directory in your console and execute this:

php src/tester.php -C tests

This will start "/tester/src/tester.php" and runs test files from the "/tester/tests" directory. The "-C" switch tells Tester to use the system-wide php ini file, that is required here because when bootstrapping ProcessWire you may run into errors (no php.ini file is used by default). You may load another ini file with the "-c <path>" (check the docs).

If the title of your Home page is "Home" you should see this:

If it's for example "Cats and Dogs", you should see this:

Running from the browser

First we need to create a new PHP file in ProcessWire's root, let's call it "testrunner.php". This is because ProcessWire doesn't allow to run PHP files from its "site" directory.

The following code runs two test classes and produces a legible output. IRL you should probably iterate through directories to get test files (eg. with glob()), and of course it's better not allow tests go out to production.

<?php
ini_set('html_errors', false);
header('Content-type: text/plain');

echo 'Starting tests.' . PHP_EOL;
echo '--------------------------' . PHP_EOL;

$file = __DIR__ . '/PATH_TO/FirstTest.php';
echo basename($file) . ' ';
require $file;
echo '[OK]' . PHP_EOL;

$file = __DIR__ . '/PATH_TO/SecondTest.php';
echo basename($file) . ' ';
require $file;
echo '[OK]' . PHP_EOL;

echo '--------------------------' . PHP_EOL;
echo 'Tests finished.';

exit;

Navigate to "DOMAIN/testrunner.php" in your browser to execute the file. If every test succeeds you should get this:

If there are failed tests the execution stops and you can read the error message. If there were more tests (eg. ThirdTest), those won't be displayed under the failed test.

06 DOM test

This test will check if a page with "basic-page" template has a "h1" element. We will create the page on the fly with ProcessWire's API. To keep things simple we will add the new test as a new method to our MyTest class.

Add this block to the MyTest class:

public function testBasicPageHeadline()
{
    $p = new Page();
    $p->template = 'basic-page';
    $html = $p->render();
    $dom = DomQuery::fromHtml($html);

    Assert::true($dom->has('h1'));
}

This will most likely be true but of course you can check for something more specific, for example "div#main". Note that we have used the DomQuery helper here (check the "use" statement on the top of the file).

07 Custom function test

You will probably want to make sure your custom functions/methods will work as they should so let's write a test that demonstrates this.

I don't want to complicate things so I'll check if the built-in "pageName" sanitizer works as expected. Add this to the myTest class:

public function testPageNameSanitizer()
{
    $expected = 'hello-world';
    $actual = wire('sanitizer')->pageName('Hello world!', true);

    Assert::equal($expected, $actual);
}

This should also be true. Try to change the expected value if you are eager to see a failure message.
 
08 Next steps

You can add more methods to the MyTest class or create new files in the "tests" directory. Check out the range of available Assertions and other features in the docs and see how they could help you writing more fail-safe code.

Once you make a habit of writing tests you'll see how it can assist making your code more bulletproof and stable. Remember: test early, test often ?

If you find out something useful or cool with Tester make sure to share.

[szabesz]

Great intro @tpr thanks!

[LostKobrakai]

It seems like nette is a bit less crufty than phpunit, which is nice. However I'm wondering how you're handling state in the database. E.g. how do you make sure if one tests creates a new page it's not affecting the next test?

[tpr]

Honestly I haven't went that far yet but the closest I found are the setUp and tearDown methods (see the docs). Of course this creates holes in the autoincrement ids but I don't think that matters much. 

Method calls order
------------------
setUp()
testOne()
tearDown()

setUp()
testTwo()
tearDown()

[tpr]

When using setUp and tearDown methods it's good to keep in mind that Tester runs tests in parallel threads. That is, if you except that a Page you create in the setUp method will be deleted in tearDown before the next test method begins, you may be wrong.

For example I've created and saved a new Page with the same title in setUp and deleted it in tearDown. I randomly got a ProcessWire error saying it could not generate a unique name for the page, and that was because the other tests have been started before the page could be deleted in the tearDown method.

The actual thread number can be retrieved, so appending it to the title solved the issue (or by adding a random suffix):

$p->title = 'Test ' . getenv(\Tester\Environment::THREAD);

Alternatively you can reduce the number of threads to 1 with the "-j 1" switch (runtime will increase a lot).

[tpr]

I've updated the first post with info on how to run tests from the browser, so there's no need to have command line access to the server.

[tpr]

I'm working on a module that makes easier to run tests, from within the admin. It's a process module and you can add pages anywhere in the admin and set each page a tests directory. So you can add new tester pages, or specify a path to an existing tests directory, see my TemplateLatteReplace module's tests in action on the screencap. Furthermore you can narrow the list of tests within a directory with URL parameters, to include only a few tests or exclude some. This may come handy if you don't want to run all the tests within a directory.

Another handy feature is that you can re-run tests via ajax, that makes it easy to check whether your fixes are working (whether in "real" code or in test code).

[tpr]

I'm close to release the initial version of the module, only a few issues are left behind.

I rewrite the UI so it uses ajax all the time. It was an overkill to start all test on page load, plus it was done in one PHP thread which involved a few issues (timeout, included files were inherited by next tests, etc). With ajax it's not only user-friendlier but more reliable too, and it's possible to catch PHP errors too (beforehands the syntax error was outputted on the whole page).

I also managed to format the Assert error message so now it's much easier to grasp the message.

I really like how it looks and works now. Even so it seems simple the JS part was tricky sometimes ?

[arjen]

This is really nice @tpr! I am currently reading up on these test suites like Codeception and Tester or plain testing like phpunit. This comes in very handy.

[Richard Jedlička]

Hello there, it is good to hear that someone cares about code testing in PW community. Some time ago I've created a tool which helps you to run your tests against multiple version of PW quite easily. You can check it out there: https://github.com/uiii/tense. It is compatible with any testing framework. I would be really glad if I'm not the only one using it ?

[Richard Jedlička]

 

5 hours ago, Richard Jedlička said:

... I've created a tool which helps you to run your tests against multiple version of PW quite easily. You can check it out there: https://github.com/uiii/tense. ...

But the truth is my tool is more suitable for module or site profile development rather than for site testing, where you would test the specific PW instance.

[tpr]

6 hours ago, Richard Jedlička said:

Hello there, it is good to hear that someone cares about code testing in PW community.

Well I'm a starter only but it's fun, and knowing you can any time run tests to ensure everything is OK is invaluable.

[tpr]

Just added the beforementioned ProcessNetteTester module download links to the first post. Read the readme on GitHub on how to set it up.

[celfred]

Hello,

I am discovering PHP tests and this great module (thanks !).

Just to mention in case it helps others. The first example kept failing on my website until I understood it was due to the multilanguage setup. Eventually, test 01 became :

	    public function testHomeTitle()
    {
      $expected = 'Home'; // we expect the page title to be "Home"
      $actual = wire('pages')->get(1)->title->getLanguageValue("default"); // check what's the actual title
      Assert::equal($expected, $actual); // check whether they are equal
    }

and passed ? 

This may seem perfectly obvious to most of you, but it might help a few ?

By the way, I wish I could use my usual debugging tools to debug my tests (sounds quite funny to say ? ) and write something like 

	bd($actual);
	

Here I had to fiddle until I found out about my multiLanguage thing... Would you have any tips on that ?

 

[adrian]

3 minutes ago, celfred said:

By the way, I wish I could use my usual debugging tools to debug my tests (sounds quite funny to say ? ) and write something like 

	bd($actual);
	

Here I had to fiddle until I found out about my multiLanguage thing... Would you have any tips on that ?

It might be a module load order issue. Please try grabbing the latest dev version of PW and the latest Tracy and see if that helps. Tracy is now the first module loaded so that should hopefully solve things for you.

[celfred]

On 9/23/2018 at 5:41 PM, adrian said:

It might be a module load order issue. Please try grabbing the latest dev version of PW and the latest Tracy and see if that helps. Tracy is now the first module loaded so that should hopefully solve things for you.

Thanks a lot for your quick help. But I'm not that good and I am running PW 3.0.62 both on local and production. I won't update right now because I'm not able to easily manage different version on local and remote... So I'll manage little by little and do the update later ? But thanks !