Using PHPUnit to test cookies and sessions, how?

Question

With PHPUnit it's quite easy to test raw PHP code, but what about code that heavily relies on cookies? Sessions could be a good example.

Is there a method that doesn't require me to setup $_COOKIE with data during my test? It feels like a hacky way of doing things.

Answer 1

This is a common problem with code, especially lagacy PHP code. The common technique used is to further abstract the COOKIE/SESSION variables in related objects and using inversion of control technique(s) to pull those dependencies into scope.

http://martinfowler.com/articles/injection.html

Now before you execute a test you would instantiate a mock version of a Cookie/Session object and provide default data.

I imagine, the same effect can be achieved with legacy code by simply overriding the super global value before executing the test.

Cheers, Alex

Answer 2

I understand this is quite old, but I believe this needs to be updated as technology has improved since the original post. I was able to get sessions working with this solution using php 5.4 with phpunit 3.7:

class UserTest extends \PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase {
    //....
    public function __construct () {
        ob_start();
    }

    protected function setUp() {
       $this->object = new \User();
    }

    public function testUserLogin() {
       $this->object->setUsername('test');
       $this->object->setPassword('testpw');
       // sets the session within:
       $this->assertEquals(true, $this->object->login());
    }
}

Answer 3

I found that I could use PHPUnit to test the behavior of the part of my website that relies heavily on sessions, through a combination of Curl and a cookie that passes the session id.

The following Curl class uses the CURLOPT_COOKIE option to pass a session parameter. The static variable $sessionid saves the session between different Curl calls. Further, sessions can be changed using the static function changeSession.

class Curl {
    private $ch;
    private static $sessionid;

    public function __construct($url, $options) {
        $this->ch = curl_init($url);

        if (!self::$sessionid)
            self::$sessionid = .. generateRandomString() ..;

        $options = $options + array(
            CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
            CURLOPT_COOKIE => 'PHPSESSID=' . self::$sessionid);

        foreach ($options as $key => $val) {
            curl_setopt($this->ch, $key, $val);
        }
    }

    public function getResponse() {
        if ($this->response) {
            return $this->response;
        }

        $response = curl_exec($this->ch);
        $error    = curl_error($this->ch);
        $errno    = curl_errno($this->ch);
        $header_size = curl_getinfo($this->ch, CURLINFO_HEADER_SIZE);
        $this->header = substr($response, 0, $header_size);
        $response = substr($response, $header_size);

        if (is_resource($this->ch)) {
            curl_close($this->ch);
        }

        if (0 !== $errno) {
            throw new \RuntimeException($error, $errno);
        }

        return $this->response = $response;
    }

    public function __toString() {
        return $this->getResponse();
    }

    public static function changeSession() {
        self::$SESSIONID = Practicalia::generateRandomString();
    }
}

An example call

$data = array(
    'action' => 'someaction',
    'info' => 'someinfo'
);

$curl = new Curl(
    'http://localhost/somephp.php', 
    array(
        CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS => http_build_query($data)));

$response = $curl->getResponse();

And any subsequent Curl calls will automatically use the same session as the previous one, unless specifically Curl::changeSession() is called.