Laravel: How to enable stacktrace error on PhpUnit

Question

I have a fresh installation of laravel 5.4

I've tried to modify the default test just to see a failing test.

tests/ExampleTest.php

class ExampleTest extends TestCase
{
    /**
     * A basic test example.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function testBasicTest()
    {
        $response = $this->get('/ooops');

        $response->assertStatus(200);
    }
}

I was expecting to see more detailed error like no route has been found or defined etc, but instead just this error saying

Time: 1.13 seconds, Memory: 8.00MB

There was 1 failure:

1) Tests\Feature\ExampleTest::testBasicTest
Expected status code 200 but received 404.
Failed asserting that false is true.

/var/www/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/Testing/TestResponse.php:51
/var/www/tests/Feature/ExampleTest.php:21

Its really hard to do TDD without meaningful error (yeah I know 404 in this case is enough, but most of the time its not the case).

Is there a way to enable the stacktrace the same as the one displayed on the browser? Or at least closer to that one so that I know what's the next step I should do.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

For Laravel 5.4 you can use disableExceptionHandling method presented by Adam Wathan in this gist (source code below)

Now if you run in your test:

$this->disableExceptionHandling();

you should get full info that will help you to find the problem.

For Laravel 5.5 and up you can use withoutExceptionHandling method that is built-in into Laravel

Source code of Adam Wathan's gist

<?php

namespace Tests;

use App\Exceptions\Handler;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Debug\ExceptionHandler;
use Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\TestCase as BaseTestCase;

abstract class TestCase extends BaseTestCase
{
    use CreatesApplication;

    protected function setUp()
    {
        /**
         * This disables the exception handling to display the stacktrace on the console
         * the same way as it shown on the browser
         */
        parent::setUp();
        $this->disableExceptionHandling();
    }

    protected function disableExceptionHandling()
    {
        $this->app->instance(ExceptionHandler::class, new class extends Handler {
            public function __construct() {}

            public function report(\Exception $e)
            {
                // no-op
            }

            public function render($request, \Exception $e) {
                throw $e;
            }
        });
    }
}

Answer 2

If you happen to use Laravel 5.5 and up, you can use the built-in methods:

$this->withoutExceptionHandling();
$this->withExceptionHandling();

Either in your setUp method, or in your test method's. They are defined in the following trait.

For quick and dirty debugging, you can also use the dump method on the response object:

/** @test */
public function it_can_delete_an_attribute()
{
    $response = $this->json('DELETE', "/api/attributes/3");

    $response->dump()->assertStatus(200);

    $this->assertDatabaseMissing('table', [
        'id' => $id
    ]);

    ...
}

There is a laracast lesson that covers these details.