Basic API Testing with PHP’s HTTP Client Guzzle

I like writing test code in Ruby. It’s a preference; I feel I write easy-to-read and easy-to-maintain code in them than with using Java, the programming language I started with in learning to write automated checks. We use PHP in building apps though. So even if I can switch programming languages to work with, sometimes I think about how to replicate my existing test code with PHP, because maybe sometime in the future they’ll have an interest in doing what I do for themselves. If I know how to re-write my test code in a programming language they are familiar with then I can help them with that.

In today’s post, I’m sharing some notes about what I found working when building simple API tests with PHP’s HTTP client Guzzle.

To start with, we have to install necessary dependencies. One such way for PHP projects is through Composer, which we’ll have a composer.json file in the root directory. I have mine set up with the following:

{
     "require-dev": {
          "behat/behat": "2.5.5",
          "guzzlehttp/guzzle": "~6.0",
          "phpunit/phpunit": "^5.7"
     }
}

Using Guzzle in code, often in combination with Behat we’ll have something like this:

use Behat\Behat\Tester\Exception\PendingException;
use Behat\Behat\Context\Context;
use Behat\Behat\Context\SnippetAcceptingContext;
use Behat\Gherkin\Node\PyStringNode;
use Behat\Gherkin\Node\TableNode;
use GuzzleHttp\Client;

     class FeatureContext extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase implements Context, SnippetAcceptingContext
     {
         // test code here
     }


where test steps will become functions inside the FeatureContext class. Our API tests will live inside such functions.

Here’s an example of a GET request, where we can check if some content is displayed on a page:

/**
* @Given a sample GET API test
*/
public function aSampleGET()
{
     $client = new Client();
     $response = $client -> request('GET', 'page_URL');
     $contents = (string) $response -> getBody();
     $this -> assertContains($contents, 'content_to_check');
}


For making requests to a secure site, we’ll have to update the sample request method to:

request('GET', 'page_URL', ['verify' => 'cacert.pem']);

where cacert.pem is a certificate file in the project’s root directory. We can of course change the file location if we please.

Now here’s an example of a POST request, where we are submitting an information to a page and verifying the application’s behavior afterwards:

/**
* @Given a sample POST API test
*/
public function aSamplePOST()
{
     $client = new Client(['cookies' => true]);
     $response = $client -> request('POST', 'page_URL', ['form_params' => [
          'param_1' => 'value_1',
          'param_2' => 'value_2'
     ]]);
     $contents = (string) $response -> getBody();
     $this -> assertContains($contents, 'content_to_check');
}


This is a basic POST request. You may notice that I added a cookies parameter when initializing the Guzzle client this time. That’s because I wanted the same cookies in the initial request to be used in succeeding requests. We can remove that if we want to.

There’s a more tricky kind of POST request, something where we need to upload a certain file (often an image or a document) as a parameter to the request. We can do that by:

/**
* @Given a sample POST Multipart API test
*/
public function aSampleMultipartPOST()
{
     $client = new Client(['cookies' => true]);
     $response = $client -> request('POST', 'page_URL', ['multipart' => [
          [
               'name' => 'param_1',
               'contents' => 'value_1'
          ],
          [
               'name' => 'param_2_file',
               'contents' => fopen('file_location', 'r')
          ]
     ]]);
     $contents = (string) $response -> getBody();
     $this -> assertContains($contents, 'content_to_check');
}


and use whatever document/image we have in our machine. We just need to specify the correct location of the file we want to upload.