Behat for testing RESTful APIs

The code for behat’s FeatureContext comes from this repo and book https://github.com/philsturgeon/build-apis-you-wont-hate I will bring it together so before long you can run tests like this The road map will be Quick Setup Notes GET requests POST request Tie into your framework Seeding step Query your db step PUT request Quick Setup Notes Setting up behat is beyond the scope of this. If you want try alnutile/behat-seed to get going on testing since it can be used to hit any API.

August 13, 2014 Read
Boris REPL and you Applicatoin (Silex in this case)

This video will cover the details http://youtu.be/RHdxSsCDmNQ Just a few notes though https://github.com/d11wtq/boris is a better place for getting started overall. Borisrc This lives in the root of my application which includes the startup file for the application. <?php #.borisrc $core = require_once(__DIR__.'/bootstrap/start.php'); $boris = new \Boris\Boris('base_app> '); $boris->setLocal(array('core' => $core)); $boris->start(); The start.php file I am using for the core startup needed by index.php, this and later a command line class to run the queue daemon and other things

August 10, 2014 Read
Polymorphic relationship Laravel

This example will show a typical “Attachment” need. The Laravel docs really do cover alot as seen here especially “Polymorphic Relation Table Structure”. I cover many to many polymorphic relationships here I will cover an example of an Attachment that has some fields. And it is related to a model, in this example “Post” Using the Way Generators to make this resource. php artisan generate:resource attachment --fields="attachable_type:string, attachable_id:integer, name:string, file_name:string, note:text, tag:string” As noted in the laravel docs our table for Attachments would look something like this

July 20, 2014 Read
Quick way to traverse a nested php arrray

The RecursiveIteratorIterator makes it super easy to traverse a nested array. Here is an example though the docs are pretty clear there. For me it was in a class so I defined the array keys at the top of the Class protected $merged_profile_options = []; protected $data_values = [ 'browser' => null, 'name' => null, 'version' => null, 'platform' => null, 'base_url' => null, 'repo' => null, 'filename' => null, 'branch' => null, 'status' => null, 'user_uuid' => null, 'remote_job_id' => null, 'job_id' => null, ]; Then later on iterated over that array.

July 17, 2014 Read
Using VCR for PHP API Testing

Testing that your code works against an API can take up lots of un-needed time. With this php-vcr library you can do ONE real request that saves a fixture file that will automatically be used with each additional requests! They have decent docs on setting up but I will walk through them here. I will base this off a seed phpunit repo I have https://github.com/alnutile/base_library_repo You will need to add to the composer.

July 16, 2014 Read
Saucelabs PHP Client

It is built off of the php-github-api client seen here by KnpLabs . They made a really nice client that uses Guzzle and an AbstractionAPI to make it easy to code out different classes around the API endpoints. Anyways I have had such a good experience with github one I figured it would be nice to have one for the Saucelabs work I do. https://github.com/alnutile/saucelabs_client more features will be added shortly as it is being used in a couple of decent size projects.

July 11, 2014 Read
Many to Many Polymorphic Relations from Laravel to Angular and back

This will cover having a polymorphic relationship in Laravel, showing it on a form in Angular and saving it back to Laravel. Overall it is well documented here at the great docs at Laravel but this post might help in a few areas. As someone defines Polymorphic Relationships there “Polymorphic relations allow a model to belong to more than one other model, on a single association. For example, you might have a photo model that belongs to either a staff model or an order model.

July 5, 2014 Read
Laravel Homestead and MailCatcher

Using MailCatcher http://mailcatcher.me/ I can see the emails sent by the website. First checkout https://github.com/fideloper/Vaprobash/pull/348 to get your box ready All I did was Log into the vagrant box and run sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-dev Then sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.1-dev -y sudo gem install mailcatcher Then sudo gem install mailcatcher -V Set your mail.php config This is found in app/config and should be copied to app/config/local so it only applies to local

July 2, 2014 Read
Laravel Sentry and UUID

Update October 10 10:07 Have hit a few issues with this model but still working okay. To start this trait does some of the work to manage incoming POST data. <?php namespace BehatEditor\Helpers; use Rhumsaa\Uuid\Uuid; trait UuidHelper { protected $uuid; protected $saved; public function getUuid() { return $this->uuid; } public function setUuid($uuid = null) { if($uuid === null) { $uuid = $this->generateNewId()->toString(); } $this->uuid = $uuid; return $this; } /** * Get a new version 4 (random) UUID.

July 2, 2014 Read
Behat Test more than number of elements

There is a Mink step to check for the number of elements //MinkDictionary.php /** * Checks, that (?P<num>\d+) CSS elements exist on the page * * @Then /^(?:|I )should see (?P<num>\d+) "(?P<element>[^"]*)" elements?$/ */ public function assertNumElements($num, $element) { $this->assertSession()->elementsCount('css', $element, intval($num)); } But I needed one just to make sure there are some elements on the page, more than 1 for example on a reports page. I guess I could have checked for just 1 eg “#behat ol li” but I think this can come in handy for our reporting tests.

June 20, 2014 Read
Transforming Output from the Database to the View/REST layer

Having watched the screen cast here by Jeffery Way and reading Phil Sturgeon’s Build APIs You Won’t Hate I used this approach on a recent project. Basically, and they both cover it really well, instead of returning the data right to the ui/rest endpoint from the database I pass it through a class to transform the data formats, field name etc. This has been extremely helpful as we also work out some wording of fields that I can not do easily in this one class.

June 14, 2014 Read
Showing nested relationships details

This is soooo easy but this is always something this easy can be missed. In this example we have a Property Model with Buildings that have an address. So the model files look like this //Property.php //structures = buildings public function structures() { return $this->hasMany('Structure'); } //Structure.php public function address() { return $this->belongsTo("Address"); } So when I query a property I now get { "id": 1, "structures": [ { "id": 6, "address_id": 9, "address": { "id": 9, "city": "Melvinport", "state": "MT", "zip": "75182", "lat": -18.

June 9, 2014 Read