Debugging and Testing

Testing

GNU social isn't too big or hard to understand, but remember that events are asynchronous and every handler must take care not to interfere with core and other plugins normal behaviours.

We encourage Test-driven development, as it helps preventing regressions and unexpected behaviour.

To run GNU social's tests you can execute:

make tests

To write your own TestCase you can use App\Util\GNUsocialTestCase.

To mock HTTP requests you can $client = static::createClient();.

Finally, to use services such as queues you must parent::bootKernel();.

As the test framework we adopted PHPUnit, you have a list of possible assertions in PHPUnit Manual.

Debugging

Because we are using Symfony, we recall that a useful tool for debugging is Symfony's VarDumper component, as a more friendly alternative to PHP's var_dump and print_r.

There's also a PsySH REPL that you can access with bin/console psysh and experiment with direct calling of GNU social functions.