Laravel: Lightning Fast Testing for Subscription Payments With Stripe

I should have a base test suite that can run without an internet connection, and it should be super fast. Both of them, at the same time.

Photo by Veri Ivanova on Unsplash

Laravel has been my go-to framework for all of my side projects thanks to its ease of use, but while integrating Cashier into Nana recently, I have seen that there is no easy way of testing the subscription creation flows when using Cashier. The docs suggest that you do real calls against the Stripe’s test APIs:

When testing an application that uses Cashier, you may mock the actual HTTP requests to the Stripe API; however, this requires you to partially re-implement Cashier’s own behavior. Therefore, we recommend allowing your tests to hit the actual Stripe API.

This might be good advice for certain cases, and would definitely provide a good way to test the flow end-to-end, and it has some advantages:

• The flow can be tested end-to-end, along with the API contracts and the endpoints in the application.
• The tests have overall better confidence due to being able to test multiple units within a single test case, such as auth, database interactions, Cashier, payment flows, and more.