Reset the records in the database in Laravel during testing, but not the database itself

Question

I am tesing now my Laravel app and facing the next problem: my project was migrated from a no-framework PHP project, which already has its own database, so I do no have migrations for most of db data. During the testing I need to refresh my database, but as far as I now, when I use use RefreshDatabase; my whole database is being refreshed(so the tables are being dropped as well), so laravel supposes, that I am migrating my db tables every time, what I am not doing. So the question is: is it possible for every new test to refresh just the records( I mean delete them), but not the whole database ? I've googled it and unfortunately did not find something, which might help. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If you are using Phpunit you can use DatabaseTransactions it will add to the database what you added in tests and after that, it will delete it. Just use it like a trait.

If you don't want to create a testing database it's easy way like this:

<?php

use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\DatabaseTransactions;

class ExampleTest extends TestCase
{
    use DatabaseTransactions;
    ...

You can find more about that in the docs.

Answer 2

You have to set your testing DB on memory so it will not affect your main database for every test. Just change the phpunit.xml file like below:

  <php>
    <env name="APP_ENV" value="testing"/>
    <env name="BCRYPT_ROUNDS" value="4"/>
    <env name="DB_CONNECTION" value="sqlite"/>
    <env name="DB_DATABASE" value=":memory:"/>
    <env name="CACHE_DRIVER" value="array"/>
    <env name="SESSION_DRIVER" value="array"/>
    <env name="QUEUE_DRIVER" value="sync"/>
    <env name="MAIL_DRIVER" value="array"/>
 </php>