Functionnal tests in symfony2 with authentication
Let’s say you have your symfony2 website, all setup correctly with its set of functionnal tests using phpunit, and now you start to have pages that only authenticated users can access to. My first solution was to create a client, make it load the login form, submit some valid credentials and then load the actual page to test. It was working fine as the client has a storage for cookie, it is acting like an actual browser in that case.
The problem was that the time to execute the test was much longer, which started to become a problem has the test suite was growing.
The first trick is to follow them method adviced by symfony, which is for the test environnement to enable the HTTP Basic Authentication method. For those who doesn’t know, the HTTP standard comme with a method to authentify a user-agent by directly sending the username/password in the HTTP header (which goes along the fact that HTTP is aimed to be stateless)
in your config_test.yml add this (replace NAME_OF_YOUR_FIREWALL)
security:
firewalls:
NAME_OF_YOUR_FIREWALL:
http_basic: ~
The second trick, to not have to repeat the username/password in all your functionnal tests, is to use the LiipFunctionnalBundle follow the installation instruction and then make your functionnal test inherit from their class, like this
<?php
//...
use Liip\FunctionalTestBundle\Test\WebTestCase;
class YourTest extends WebTestCase
{
// your code
}
then you can precise in config_test.yml your credentials:
liip_functional_test:
authentication:
username: "XXXXX"
password: "YYYYY"
finally to create an authenticated client, use this method
<?php
//...
use Liip\FunctionalTestBundle\Test\WebTestCase;
class YourTest extends WebTestCase
{
public testYourFeature()
{
// true = "authenticated"
$client static::makeClient(true);
// ...
}
}