How can I unit test an Eloquent model record being inserted in Laravel 5?

Question

Everything I've googled for relating to this suggests that you shouldn't unit test Eloquent as it's already unit tested within Laravel.

However in this case I have another class, that is not an Eloquent model, but it does insert an Eloquent model record into the database. I want to unit test this class.

For example:

public function methodIWantToTest()
{
    $record = new User();

    $user->name = 'Bob';
    $user->email = '[email protected]';

    $user->save();
}

How would I unit test this method? When I try it actually inserts into the database. Surely I should be able to do this without even having to go near the database?

Answer 1

if you don't want to use seeInDatabase() maybe you should try:

$mock = Mockery::mock('User');
$mock->shouldReceive('save')->once()->andReturn(true); 
$this->assertTrue(methodIWantToTest($mock));