One Trick to speed up your unit tests with Laravel

TLDR; Don't use the base TestCase which ships with laravel out of the box. If your tests don't require Laravel specific functionality, Using PHPUnit's base TestCase is more than 4 times faster.

Benchmark

For this test, I'm using the latest version of Laravel (7.25.0) on a Macbook Pro with 16GB RAM and a 2.3 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 processor.

Setup

1. Install Laravel from the official guide here

2. Create a class called Math in app/Math.php
   

   <?php
   
   declare(strict_types=1);
   
   namespace App;
   
   class Math
   {
       function sum(int $first, int $second): int {
           return $first + $second;
       }
   }
   

3. Add the test file MathTest.php in tests/Unit
   

   <?php
   
   declare(strict_types=1);
   
   namespace Tests\Unit;
   
   use App\Math;
   use Tests\TestCase;
   
   class MathTest extends TestCase
   {
       /**
        * @dataProvider provideDataForSum
        *
        * @param int $first
        * @param int $second
        * @param int $expectedResult
        */
       function testSum(int $first, int $second, int $expectedResult) {
           $math = new Math();
           $actualResult = $math->sum($first, $second);
   
           $this->assertEquals($expectedResult, $actualResult);
       }
   
       public function provideDataForSum(): array {
           return [
               'sum two zeros (0 + 0 = 0)' => [
                   0,
                   0,
                   0
               ],
               'sum negative and positive number (-1 + 3 = 2)' => [
                   -1,
                   3,
                   2
               ],
               'sum two positive numbers (1 + 6 = 7)' => [
                   1,
                   6,
                   7
               ],
               'sum two negative numbers (-4 + -8 = -12)' => [
                   -4,
                   -8,
                   -12
               ]
           ];
       }
   }
   

4. Run the tests using
   

   ./vendor/bin/phpunit tests/Unit/MathTest.php
   

5. Results: Time: 138 ms, Memory: 16.00 MB

6. Change line 8 in MathTest.php with use PHPUnit\Framework\TestCase;

7. Run the tests again using
   

   ./vendor/bin/phpunit tests/Unit/MathTest.php
   

8. Results: Time: 33 ms, Memory: 6.00 MB

Conclusion

The test with laravel's base test case is 418% slower than the tests with PHPUnit's base test case. Also, This is just 1 test, Imagine how much time you will save on a project with more than 1000 test.

NOTE: From laravel 6.0, The ExampleTest.php file in tests/Unit now uses PHPUnit\Framework\TestCase; but If you are coming from an old version of laravel you may be using the laravel base test Tests\TestCase; instead.