Essence 1.5.1

Essence is a very flexible BDD style assertion framework for PHP that fits into existing PHPUnit projects nicely.

Installation

composer require --dev bound1ess/essence

The Idea

In most PHP testing frameworks, you are tied to concrete matcher names (e.g., assertEqual, shouldHaveType). I don't like that. That's why I created Essence.

Usage

In order to run a matcher you need to specify it in the query string. So what is a query string? Have a look:

this("someValue")->should_have_length_of(10); # => "someValue should have length of 10"
expect(123)->toBeAbove(120); # => "expect 123 to be above 120"

$elements = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];
these($elements)->values->should_contain(5); # => "these elements should contain a value '5'"

expect(null)->not()->to()->beNull(); => "expect NULL not to be NULL"

Yes, Essence is smart enough to handle all these cases just as you would expect it to do. So, how do you build a query string (or assertion)?

1. Decide if you need to configure a matcher you plan to use. As for now there are two only matchers that can be used in configuration mode - ValuesMatcher and KeysMatcher.
2. Determine what matcher you will need to use to get the job done. Is it ThrowMatcher, or, say, RespondMatcher?
3. Add some links to make the assertion readable.
4. Choose an appropriate entry point (expect, this, these etc).
5. Pass a proper value and arguments.
6. If you want to, add ->go() to immediately perform validation. I'll tell you more about that later.

Configuration

First of all, Essence leverages the singleton pattern to persist all its important data during the runtime. It means that this expression will always be equal to true:

spl_object_hash(essence()) == spl_object_hash(essence());

You can configure Essence by using configure method:

essence()->configure(function($config) {
    return array_merge($config, [
        "exception" => "Your\Custom\AssertionException",
    ]);
});

Available configuration options:

Explicit and implicit, validateAll and PHPUnit extension

If you don't want to write ->validate() or ->go() every time, you can enable implicit validation:

essence()->configure(function() {
    return [
        "implicit_validation" => true,
    ];
});

It will validate the last (previous) assertion when you create a new one. Or, even better, just use the PHPUnit extension as shown below:

class MyTestCase extends Essence\Extensions\PhpunitExtension
{

    // Your assertions here.
}

It'll do the job for you, no need to configure anything or call go/validate.

Verbose mode

This line of code will throw an Essence\Exceptions\AssertionException by default:

expect(10)->to_be_equal_to(15)->validate(); // You can also use "go" instead of "validate".

However, if you pass true to validate/go, Essence will dump all important data and just exit.

expect(10)->to_be_equal_to(15)->validate(true);

vendor/bin/phpunit
# ........
Value: 10
Arguments:
  #1: 15

Cheatsheet

Entry points

• essence
• it
• that
• this
• these
• those

Links

• of
• have
• be
• at
• to

Matchers

License

The MIT License (MIT).

Development

The Makefile contains all sorts of useful tasks.

Running tests

make run-tests

Creating code coverage report

make coverage-report coverage-report-server

Building documentation

make build-docs docs-server