The Bakery Everything CakePHP

I procrastinated, for a very long time, about which projects I'd start practising tests with; I've long admired people who wrote tests for code, but I'd never done it formally before for my own projects. I'd written tests for a few JS projects that I'd contributed to; but, as they already had a solid system in place, I simply needed to copy a few lines of existing test code and change it to meet my needs.

I recently implemented a JsonReader configuration reader for a recent project. I decided to make that my first plunge in to CakePHP testing. Turns out that writing tests is so effing easy; but getting a good testing environment set up on your local machine can be a pain.

Side note: My development environment consists of a dotfiles Git repo, SSH, tmux (but GNU Screen may be to the taste of other devs) and remote Linux machines (development and production.) I really don't like fiddling with my local machine, be it a Linux or OS X machine; I prefer to keep it fairly vanilla and keep my dev sessions running on a machine that my wife can't accidentally reboot.

As I like to keep things clean, I turned to virtualisation as a way of locally testing. I didn't want to have to mess around with a CakePHP/Apache configuration every time I wanted to test a plugin. To that end, I got started with VirtualBox & Vagrant. The virtual machine is preconfigured with PHPUnit, Xdebug, PHP 5.3ish, Apache HTTP Server. I tried to trim as much out of the distribution as possible to keep the download small but you are welcome to install new stuff to suit your needs.

What you'll need

• VirtualBox
• The gem command available from a terminal (if you're on OS X, and many Linux distros, you should be fine) If you don't have Ruby installed on your machine, RVM may be able to aid you install it locally to your profile. If you are on a Windows machine, there are solutions out there.
• Vagrant
  To install it you just need to do gem install vagrant or sudo gem install vagrant If you have never used gem before, or haven't ever heard of Ruby, or don't know what RVM is, you probably need to sudo .
• Git - you don't really need this if you're happy to download CakePHP manually.

Getting started

If you're working on a fully fledged CakePHP application, rather than a plugin or some sort of standalone lib, skip to 2:

1) Download a fresh CakePHP.

git clone git://github.com/cakephp/cakephp

cd in to the cakephp dir (eg. cd cakephp )

2) Download the CakePHP testing box that I've created:

vagrant box add cakephp http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7242440/cakephp-testing.box

vagrant init cakephp

3) Make sure your CakePHP environment is correctly configured

The testing box assumes that your CakePHP project is entirely self-contained, with no symlinks, and with a ROOT/app/webroot directory as standard

Provided that you don't have plans to do any database testing, your app/Config/database.php needs populating with a dummy/empty test database configuration.

4) Start the vagrant box

vagrant up

Accessing tests

The virtual machine is configured to automatically set up port forwarding so that you can access your application tests at http://localhost:2253/test.php

There is no need to restart the machine as the app folder is live shared. You can start making changes and rerunning tests at will. If you want to run tests from a terminal, you will need to ssh in like so:

vagrant ssh

cd /vagrant

./Console/cake xxx

Pretty simple huh?

Reusing the virtualbox

The box doesn't have to be downloaded every time you create a new project. Once you've run vagrant box add cakephp {url} , that box is available to your system under the name cakephp. If, at a later date, you have a new project which you want to test locally, you simply need to replace the aforementioned command with vagrant box init cakephp

Extending the virtualbox

Once you've downloaded it, you can do as you wish with it. You can vagrant ssh in to it and use the package manager to install new services and apps. The box was created with vagrant in mind so you can sudo without a password and apt-get or make anything you please.

Note that I placed the PHPUnit files in the vagrant user home dir so that I didn't risk pruning them when reducing the box size (it's around 600MB in size) and I've left them there due to laziness. If CakePHP, at a later date, supports newer versions of PHPUnit, you can simply cd in to each part of the PHPUnit source and use git to pull down newer releases.

But wait! That URL doesn't work/it takes forever to download the box file!

Dropbox is far from the best location to host a .box file, I admit. I've created a torrent that you can use to download it locally and help me seed until I find a better permanent location. Once you've downloaded it locally, you can give vagrant a local path when adding it eg:

vagrant box add cakephptest /path/to/cakephp-testing.box