Testing your REST APIs

You have already been testing your REST API after finishing each controller by making some request and expecting a response. As you might imagine, this can be handy sometimes, but it is for sure not the way to go. Testing should be automatic, and should cover as much as possible. We will have to think of a solution similar to unit testing.

In Chapter 10, Behavioral Testing, you will learn more methodologies and tools for testing an application end to end, and that will include REST APIs. However, due to the simplicity of our REST API, we can add some pretty good tests with what Laravel provides us as well. Actually, the idea is very similar to the tests that we wrote in Chapter 8, Using Existing PHP Frameworks, where we made a request to some endpoint, and expected a response. The only difference will be in the kind of assertions that we use (which can check if a JSON response is OK), and the way we perform requests.

Let's add some tests to the set of endpoints related...