Using Mockery to test controllers

Sometimes, we need to test the code that uses our database. The commonly accepted practice is that we shouldn't actually do live queries on the database while running a unit test. To get around this, we can use the Mockery package to fake our data.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we need to have Laravel installed and working, as well as PHPUnit from the Setting up and configuring PHPUnit recipe.

How to do it...

To complete this recipe, follow the given steps:

1. Open up our composer.json file, and make sure the following code is included:

     "require-dev": 
   {
     "phpunit/phpunit": "3.7.*",
     "mockery/mockery": "dev-master"
   },

2. Open the command line terminal and run the Composer update with the following command:

     php composer.phar update
   

3. After the update, in the app/controllers directory, create the ShipsController.php file using the following code:

   <?php
   
   class ShipsController extends BaseController {
   
     protected $ships; 
     public function __construct(Spaceship ...