This is the quick-start to CodeIgniter testing. Its intent is to describe what it takes to set up your system and get it ready to run unit tests. It is not intended to be a full description of the test features that you can use to test your application. Those details can be found in the documentation.
It is recommended to use the latest version of PHPUnit. At the time of this writing we are running version 8.5.13. Support for this has been built into the composer.json file that ships with CodeIgniter and can easily be installed via Composer if you don't already have it installed globally.
> composer install
If running under OS X or Linux, you can create a symbolic link to make running tests a touch nicer.
> ln -s ./vendor/bin/phpunit ./phpunit
You also need to install XDebug in order for code coverage to be calculated successfully.
A number of the tests use a running database.
In order to set up the database edit the details for the tests group in
app/Config/Database.php or phpunit.xml. Make sure that you provide a database engine
that is currently running on your machine. More details on a test database setup are in the
Docs>>Testing>>Testing Your Database section of the documentation.
If you want to run the tests without using live database you can exclude @DatabaseLive group. Or make a copy of phpunit.dist.xml - call it phpunit.xml - and comment out the named "database". This will make the tests run quite a bit faster.
The entire test suite can be run by simply typing one command-line command from the main directory.
> ./phpunit
You can limit tests to those within a single test directory by specifying the directory name after phpunit. All core tests are stored under tests/system.
> ./phpunit tests/system/HTTP/
Individual tests can be run by including the relative path to the test file.
> ./phpunit tests/system/HTTP/RequestTest.php
You can run the tests without running the live database tests.
> ./phpunit --exclude-group DatabaseLive
To generate coverage information, including HTML reports you can view in your browser, you can use the following command:
> ./phpunit --colors --coverage-text=tests/coverage.txt --coverage-html=tests/coverage/ -d memory_limit=1024m
This runs all of the tests again collecting information about how many lines, functions, and files are tested. It also reports the percentage of the code that is covered by tests. It is collected in two formats: a simple text file that provides an overview as well as a comprehensive collection of HTML files that show the status of every line of code in the project.
The text file can be found at tests/coverage.txt. The HTML files can be viewed by opening tests/coverage/index.html in your favorite browser.
The repository has a phpunit.xml.dist file in the project root that's used for
PHPUnit configuration. This is used to provide a default configuration if you
do not have your own configuration file in the project root.
The normal practice would be to copy phpunit.xml.dist to phpunit.xml
(which is git ignored), and to tailor it as you see fit.
For instance, you might wish to exclude database tests, or automatically generate
HTML code coverage reports.