Unit testing an app that uses Sentinel

[levacic]

So I'm using Laravel 4.2 with Sentinel 1.0.5, but I can see the same problematic code in the latest version as well, and it's this line in particular:

sentinel/src/Laravel/SentinelServiceProvider.php

Line 46 in 944a69c

$this->garbageCollect();

When I run unit tests without a database (which isn't unreasonable), I randomly get exceptions when Sentinel fails to find the activations and permissions database tables - which is expected, since there is no database in the first place.

Is there any recommended way to do what I want, that isn't "use a database for testing"?

The boot() method gets called when the application gets booted, so I don't know if there's a way around it - perhaps if the garbage collection code is moved to the closure within SentinelServiceProvider::registerSentinel()? Then garbage collection would only kick in when an actual Sentinel instance is requested somewhere - which is not something I'll ever be doing in my app's unit tests - I might only have mocks of the Sentinel class there, but since this package already has comprehensive tests, I don't want to test Sentinel itself in my app's tests.

Something like this, basically:

    protected function registerSentinel()
    {
        $that = $this;

        $this->app['sentinel'] = $this->app->share(function($app) use ($that)
        {
            $that->garbageCollect();

            /* rest of the service provider */
        }
    }

Of course, the call to $this->garbageCollect() within the service provider's boot() method would be removed.

Another solution, which seems to work for me is to have an environment-specific Sentinel configuration file. In other words, I have the file app/config/packages/cartalyst/sentinel/testing/config.php with the following contents:

<?php

return [
    'activations' => [
        'lottery' => [0, 100],
    ],
    'reminders' => [
        'lottery' => [0, 100],
    ],
];

Am I wrong in feeling that this is a little too hacky? Because, basically, it's like saying "in testing, you have a 0% chance of triggering garbage collection", as opposed to "in testing, don't ever try to perform garbage collection". Or maybe this is okay, and I'm just being obtuse.

Thanks in advance for any comments on this!

[james-daddies]

You can setup a SQLite db for testing. Set this up as your default in database.php under config/testing

'sqlite' => array(
    'driver'   => 'sqlite',
    'database' => ':memory:',
    'prefix'   => '',
),

Then in your setup method for your unit tests:

$this->app['artisan']->call('migrate', ['--package' => 'cartalyst/sentinel']);

Making the SQLite db in memory, you still get your fast test times.