Do you know Jasmine, the BDD framework for JavaScript? This holidays I was looking for something like that in PHP and I didn’t found anything similar (please let me know if I’m wrong) (now I know a few of them thanks to Dave’s comment) . Because of that, and as an exercise, I hack a little bit building something similar for PHP.

I want to write as less code as I can (it’s only a proof of concept), so I will reuse the assertion framework or PHPUnit. As I’ve seen when studying Behat, we can use the assertion part as standalone functions. We only need to include vendor/phpunit/phpunit/PHPUnit/Framework/Assert/Functions.php file

Here you can see one example.

class StringCalculator { public function add($string) { return (int)array_sum(explode(",", $string)); } } $stringCalculator = new StringCalculator; describe("add mull returns zero", function () use ($stringCalculator) { assertEquals(null, $stringCalculator->add("")); }); describe("1,1 should return 2", function () use ($stringCalculator) { assertEquals(2, $stringCalculator->add("1,1")); });

We also can use something similar than DataProvider in PHPUnit:

describe("add number returns number", function ($expected, $actual, $message) use ($stringCalculator) { assertEquals($expected, $stringCalculator->add($actual), $message); }, [ ['expected' => 1, 'actual' => "1", 'message' => 'add 1'], ['expected' => 2, 'actual' => "2", 'message' => 'add 1'], ['expected' => 10, 'actual' => "10", 'message' => 'add 10'], ]);

And if we need mocks we can use Mockery, for example:

class Temperature { public function __construct($service) { $this->_service = $service; } public function average() { $total = 0; for ($i=0;$i<3;$i++) { $total += $this->_service->readTemp(); } return $total/3; } } $service = m::mock('service'); describe("testing mocks with mockery", function() use ($service) { $service->shouldReceive('readTemp')->andReturn(11, 12, 13); $temperature = new Temperature($service); assertEquals(12, $temperature->average(), "dummy message"); });

I’ve created an small console application to run the test suites using symfony/console and symfony/finder components. We can run it with:

php ./bin/console.php texter:run ./tests

Beware because this library is a proof of concept. There’re a lot of remaining things. What do you think?

Source code at github