How to test your Laravel application's views

Laravel is a full-stack framework that has many components, from routing, to middlewares, to views. Manually testing each of these components is very stressful and not very efficient. Laravel provides an easy way to test our application. Laravel’s feature tests let you make HTTP requests to your application and examine the response.

To get started, use the laravel installer to create a Laravel application.

laravel new testy

Now, the application bootstraps with a test directory that has the Feature and Unit sub-directories. In this shot, we will create a feature test to examine our application’s views.
Next, you want to create a basic view to list users of the application. For this view to list users, you must have users on your application.
To retrieve users, update the DatabaseSeeder.php seeder file’s run method to contain the following:

User::factory(20)->create();

This creates 20 fake users when run.

Now, seed the database.

php artisan db:seed

Update the web.php file to fetch all users and pass them to the view.

Route::get('/', function () {
    return view('welcome')->with('users', User::all());
});

Now, the list of users can be rendered as follows:

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
    <link href="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.1.1/dist/css/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" integrity="sha384-F3w7mX95PdgyTmZZMECAngseQB83DfGTowi0iMjiWaeVhAn4FJkqJByhZMI3AhiU" crossorigin="anonymous">
    <title>Hello, world!</title>
</head>
<body>
    <table>
        <caption>Users</caption>
        <thead>
            <tr>
                <th scope="col">ID</th>
                <th scope="col">Name</th>
                <th scope="col">Email</th>
            </tr>
        </thead>
        <tbody>
            @forelse($users as $user)
            <tr>
                <th scope="row">{{ $user->id }}</th>
                <td>{{ $user->name }}</td>
                <td>{{ $user->email }}</td>
            </tr>
            @empty
                <p>No registered user</p>
            @endforelse
        </tbody>
    </table>

    <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/bootstrap@5.1.1/dist/js/bootstrap.bundle.min.js" integrity="sha384-/bQdsTh/da6pkI1MST/rWKFNjaCP5gBSY4sEBT38Q/9RBh9AH40zEOg7Hlq2THRZ" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>
</body>
</html>

Finally, we can create the test to test the view.
Run php artisan make:test to create a feature test.

php artisan make:test UsersTest

Here, we create a test named UsersTest. This creates a new file, UsersTest.php, in the tests/Feature directory.
Now, we need to update the test to match our needs. The test methods are usually named as test_, followed by the action name. So, in this case, rename it to test_users_list.
Notice how the application makes a get request to / by default and checks if the response status is 200.
The assertStatus method is used to check if the response code matches a given code.
To check if the response matches 200 exactly, you can use the assertOk method instead.
To check if a given text is on the page, i.e., to see if a user is listed, use assertSee.

$response = $this->get('/');

$user = User::first();

$response->assertSee($user->name);

You can also check if a given string is not displayed with assertDontSee.

$response->assertDontSee('Alfred');

You may also use assertViewHas to check if data is passed into the view.

$response->assertViewHas('users', User::all());

You can even check if the correct view was rendered with assertViewIs.

$response->assertViewIs('welcome');

Laravel has many more methods to test database actions and API responses. To run these tests, run the following code in the terminal:

php artisan test

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