Owen Conti

Faking the Queue in Laravel Tests

Posted on under Laravel by Owen Conti.

I'm working on a project where we use observers to dispatch a chain of jobs whenever a Volume model is created. While this is great when working on the code base, it can make it a bit difficult to write tests. For example, I want to test one of the jobs in the chain that is dispatched. Specifically, I want to make sure that the job fails when it should, and with the correct message.

So here's what I need the test to do:

  • Fake the JobFailed event so we can assert it was dispatched correctly
  • Create our model, but while the queue is faked, so the chain of jobs dispatched by the observer will not run
  • Dispatch the job we want to test
  • Assert the JobFailed event was fired

Here's what the test looked like originally:

1<?php
2 
3/** @test */
4public function it_fails_attach_volume_to_instance_if_volume_is_not_in_provisioning_state() {
5 Event::fake([JobFailed::class]);
6 
7 $queue = Queue::getFacadeRoot();
8 Queue::fake();
9 
10 $volume = VolumeFactory::make()->pending()->create();
11 
12 Queue::swap($queue);
13 
14 AttachVolumeToInstance::dispatch($volume);
15 
16 Event::assertDispatched(JobFailed::class, function ($event) {
17 return $event->exception->getMessage() === 'Volume is not in Provisioning state.';
18 });
19}

I didn't like the idea of having to store the $queue facade root and then having to replace it after. So I wrapped that up into a package:

1<?php
2 
3/** @test */
4public function it_fails_attach_volume_to_instance_if_volume_is_not_in_provisioning_state()
5{
6 // Given
7 Event::fake([JobFailed::class]);
8 
9 $volume = null;
10 QueueFake::wrap(function () use (&$volume) {
11 $volume = VolumeFactory::make()->pending()->create();
12 });
13 
14 // When
15 AttachVolumeToInstance::dispatch($volume);
16 
17 // Then
18 Event::assertDispatched(JobFailed::class, function ($event) {
19 return $event->exception->getMessage() === 'Volume is not in Provisioning state.';
20 });
21}

Now anytime we need to fake the queue for just a couple of lines, I can use QueueFake::wrap(). The queue will be faked for the duration of the closure.

Check it out on GitHub: https://github.com/ohseesoftware/laravel-queue-fake


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