Make your tests 70% smaller

In case you didn't notice, recently I have been working in a secret project called Pest: a delightful PHP Testing Framework with a focus on simplicity.

This project is under works, and it will be out soon! I've put together a website where you can subscribe to the @pestphp newsletter. Join now, and be the first to get news about this project: pestphp.com.

In this article, we are going to transform a PHPUnit test into a Pest test.

Disclaimer: PHPUnit is great! In fact, Pest is built on top of it. Pest is just an different API of creating tests.

Let's take this PHPUnit test from the Laravel.io website:

<?php

namespace Tests\Feature;

use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\DatabaseMigrations;

class HomeTest extends BrowserKitTestCase
{
    use DatabaseMigrations;

    /** @test */
    public function users_can_see_the_homepage()
    {
        $this->visit('/')
            ->see('Laravel.io')
            ->see('The Laravel Community Portal');
    }
}

The original PHPUnit test

Looking at this code, only 2 things are important:

There is a home page
When users visit that home page they see "Laravel.io" and "The Laravel Community Portal".

So let's put what really matters in our test with Pest:

<?php

it('has home page', function () {
    $this->visit('/')
        ->see('Laravel.io')
        ->see('The Laravel Community Portal');
});

The equivalent in Pest

Next, Pest also provides support for higher order messages, which are shortcuts for performing common actions while writing your tests. The best way of thinking about this is: If you don't provide a closure, the chained methods are going to create a closure for you. So let's apply this principle in our test:

<?php

it('has home page')->visit('/')
   ->see('Laravel.io')
   ->see('The Laravel Community Portal');

The equivalent in Pest using higher order messages

This Pest test is equivalent to the PHPUnit test, and it only has 5 lines, down from the 17 original lines. Most importantly, the test contains only what really matters.

Stay tuned, the early beta version will be out soon!