unittest laravel caching issue

Question

I am using laravel 4 and created a class under its own namespace. Within this class there's a method that retrieves data and caches it. I also wrote a very small unit test to check if caching works. For some reason, caching does not work when unit testing, but does work when accessing through browser. I even modified app/config/testing/cache.php driver to use apc instead of array and it still doesn't work.

Here's the code:

<?php namespace site;
use Cache;

class UserController {
    public function testCaching( )
    {
        Cache::put('test', 'testing', 1);
        if (Cache::has('test')) die("YES: " . Cache::get('test')); die("NO");
    }

}

The routes.php file (works through browser, result: 'YES testing'):

Route::get('test-caching', 'site\UserController@register');

The test (does not work with phpunit, result: 'NO'):

<?php namespace site;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\TestCase;
class SiteTest extends TestCase {
    /** @test */
    public function it_caches_vendor_token()
    {   
        $user = new UserController();
        $user->testCaching();
    }
}

Did anyone else experience this problem? Any solutions?

Answer 1

In unit testing, I would get Cache not found in ...

The problem was that I wasn't bootstraping correctly my test environment. Since my application wasn't correctly bootstrapped, it would not register the alias (Cache, Eloquent, Log, etc). To correctly bootstrap, you need to extend the TestCase provided that looks like

use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\TestCase as BaseCase;

class TestCase extends BaseCase
{
    /**
     * The base URL to use while testing the application.
     *
     * @var string
     */
     protected $baseUrl = 'http://localhost.dev';

     /**
     * Creates the application.
     *
     * @return \Illuminate\Foundation\Application
     */
     public function createApplication()
     {
         $app = include __DIR__.'/../bootstrap/app.php';

         $app->make(\Illuminate\Contracts\Console\Kernel::class)->bootstrap();

         return $app;
     }
}

and in your test should look like this

class MyBrandNewTest extends TestCase 
{
    // You can omit to override this method if you
    // do not have custom setup logic for your test case
    public function setUp()
    {
        parent::setUp();

        // Do custom setup logic here
    }
}

parent::setUp() will call the setUp method in BaseTest which will bootstrap the test environment.