Mocking and faking in Laravel - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Mocking and Faking in Laravel Testing

📖 Scenario: You are building a Laravel application that sends welcome emails to new users. To ensure your email sending logic works correctly without actually sending emails during tests, you will use Laravel's mocking and faking features.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple Laravel test that fakes the mail sending and verifies that the welcome email is sent when a new user is created.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a User model instance with specific attributes

Fake the mail sending using Laravel's Mail facade

Trigger the welcome email sending logic

Assert that the welcome email was sent to the correct user

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

In real Laravel applications, you want to test email sending without actually sending emails. Mocking and faking mail helps you verify your code works safely and quickly.

💼 Career

Understanding mocking and faking is essential for Laravel developers to write reliable automated tests, which is a key skill in professional software development.

1

Create a User instance

Create a variable called $user that holds a new User instance with the name set to 'John Doe' and email set to '[e-mail]'.

Laravel

<?php

namespace Tests\Feature;

use Tests\TestCase;
use App\Models\User;

class WelcomeEmailTest extends TestCase
{
    public function test_welcome_email_is_sent()
    {
        // Create a User instance with name 'John Doe' and email '[e-mail]'
        // Your code here
    }
}

Need a hint?

Use new User([...]) to create the user instance with the exact attributes.

2

Fake the Mail facade

Add the line \Illuminate\Support\Facades\Mail::fake(); at the start of the test_welcome_email_is_sent method to fake mail sending.

Laravel

 'John Doe', 'email' => '[e-mail]']);
        // Fake the mail sending here
        // Your code here
    }
}

Need a hint?

Use Mail::fake(); to prevent actual emails from being sent during the test.

3

Trigger the welcome email sending

Call the method sendWelcomeEmail() on the $user variable to simulate sending the welcome email.

Laravel

 'John Doe', 'email' => '[e-mail]']);
        // Call sendWelcomeEmail() on $user
        // Your code here
    }
}

Need a hint?

Call sendWelcomeEmail() on the $user variable to trigger the email logic.

4

Assert the welcome email was sent

Add an assertion using Mail::assertSent() to check that the App\Mail\WelcomeMail was sent to '[e-mail]'.

Laravel

 'John Doe', 'email' => '[e-mail]']);
        $user->sendWelcomeEmail();
        // Assert that WelcomeMail was sent to '[e-mail]'
        // Your code here
    }
}

Need a hint?

Use Mail::assertSent(WelcomeMail::class, fn($mail) => $mail->hasTo('[e-mail]')); to check the email was sent.