Mocking Eloquent model with Mockery on Laravel (Lumen) doesn't work

Question

Pretty new to PHP, so forgive me if I missed something obvious.

I'm currently using Lumen (which is basically a basic Laravel, with only core dependencies) and Eloquent to manage persistent entities.

I want to write a Unit Test where I need to call a function which, at some point do an Eloquent query like this :

$errorMailRecipients = User::where('id_role',  1)
        ->where('some_value', 1)
        ->whereNotNull('email_addr');

My User.class, is a basic Eloquent entity :

    class User extends Model implements AuthenticatableContract, AuthorizableContract, JWTSubject
    {
       use Authenticatable, Authorizable, Eloquence, Mappable;

       const CREATED_AT = 'creation_date';
       const UPDATED_AT = 'modification_date';

       /** Eloquent model configuration */
       protected $connection = 'database_name';
       protected $table = 'user';
       protected $primaryKey = 'id';

      // other stuff mapping, functions, etc ...
}

So, I created a test and trying, with Mockery, to mock this specific query :

class ImportTest extends TestCase
{

    public function test_should_send_error_mail_when_receiving_empty_request()
    {
        // Given
        $controller = new ImportController();

        $mockedRecipients = // <- some Collection containing static data
        $mock = Mockery::mock(User::class, function ($mock) use ($mockedRecipients) {
            $mock->shouldReceive('where')->once()->andReturn($mockedRecipients);
        });
        $this->app->instance('App\Models\User', $mock);

        // When
        $controller->importDevices(new Request());

        // Then
    }
 }

I tried many variants, and to decompose mocking into multiple lines :

    $mock = Mockery::mock(User::class);
    $this->app->instance('User', $mock);
    $mock->shouldReceive('where')->once()->andReturn($mockedRecipients);

Also tried to remove the ->once(), and read the following guides :

But so far, I kept having the following error when executing PHP Unit test :

Illuminate\Database\QueryException : SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] Connection refused ...

Because, yeah, I don't have local database and it's still trying to hit it. Any thoughts ? Thank you

I would call my self an expert in Mocking and testing a laravel project seen it in multiple professional projects. It is a waste to mock query functionality, instead i would suggest using Sqllite memory db for it? if you wanna go that route i can show you. Usually people just setup their ci environment to run mysql tbh these days and run it local when testing locally. — mrhn
And the reason it is not working is due to it being called statically — mrhn
Ok thanks for your insights :) I come from the Java environment, and I'm very used to mock database queries with mockito library. I ran across multiple answers like yours, and I don't really agree. For Integration Testing, I'm totally ok to run an in memory db, to put in sets of data and test a feature from the endpoint, to the expected result. But, in my case, I want to test specific little pieces of code related to one function. — Alex
It depends on the efficiency of the mocking lib, but to my mind, it's far more lightweight to just mock a minimum response (like 2 object with few fields) instead of running a DB, insert data, cleanup data, etc ... — Alex
Laravel has features for running transactions for the cleanup and or just use Sqlite, just my two cents. I can make your code work, but will do it later in the day :) — mrhn

Alex Alex · Accepted Answer · 2020-01-29T16:37:01

I found what I was doing wrong, thanks to @mrhn ;)

Mockery allow using aliases for mocking public static functions, I wasn't aware there would be a difference at first :)

Just replacing Mockery::mock('\App\Models\User'); by Mockery::mock('alias:\App\Models\User'); did the trick.

Thus, it's not recommender to use this, so I guess I'll keep learning during my tests writings. As we will soon have a CI chain using directly MySQL instancied db to run against our app, and as @mrhn statement goes this way, I will consider doing real db calls in future.

Mocking Eloquent model with Mockery on Laravel (Lumen) doesn't work

1 Answers