Architecture testing in Laravel with Pest
Maintaining standards in an ever-growing codebase that multiple developers contribute to can be difficult and tedious. Ensuring that the codebase follows best practices and does not deviate from the standards is essential for any project. But this is typically something that can only be enforced manually by code reviews and other similar processes. As with any other manual task, this can be time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone. That's where architecture testing comes in.
Architecture testing allows you to automatically enforce code standards such as naming conventions, method usage, directory structure, and more.
In this article, we're going to learn about what architecture testing is and the benefits of using it. We'll then look at how to write architecture tests for our Laravel applications using the popular PHP testing framework, Pest. By the end, you'll be confident to start writing architecture tests for your Laravel applications.
Pest is an open-source PHP testing framework built on top of PHPUnit. At the time of writing, it has over 9.4 million downloads and 7.9k stars on GitHub. It uses a syntax and approach similar to Jest (a popular JavaScript testing framework) and Ruby's RSpec. If you're familiar with writing JavaScript tests using Jest, you should feel at home using Pest for PHP tests.
