phpunit lacks support for mocking static methods, how to mock \KeenIO\Client\KeenIOClient?

[thedavidmeister]

I'm getting PHPUnit_Framework_MockObject_BadMethodCallException when trying to mock KeenIOClient as soon as the static factory method is called.

• https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit-mock-objects/issues/169
• https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/issues/1203#issuecomment-41524062
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2357001/phpunit-mock-objects-and-static-methods

It's obvious that I won't want my unit tests actually hitting real KeenIO endpoints, but I want to test classes that use KeenIOClient, so I want to mock KeenIOClient.

What's the suggested approach here?

[thedavidmeister]

• http://misko.hevery.com/2008/12/15/static-methods-are-death-to-testability/

Sometimes a static methods is a factory for other objects. This further exuberates the testing problem. In tests we rely on the fact that we can wire objects differently replacing important dependencies with mocks. Once a new operator is called we can not override the method with a sub-class. A caller of such a static factory is permanently bound to the concrete classes which the static factory method produced. In other words the damage of the static method is far beyond the static method itself. Butting object graph wiring and construction code into static method is extra bad, since object graph wiring is how we isolate things for testing.

[Hexodus]

The above answer is very popular and certainly has good reasons to be told but this is not the final one. You can mock static calls using AspectMock . This is a mocking framework for PHPUnit / Codeception.

[stof]

The only static method in KeenIOClient is the factory method. So the answer to mocking is to inject the instance into your own class instead of making your class instantiate the KeenIOClient itself. This way, you can inject a mock in it, and all methods you would need to mock are non-static ones.

[elof]

Not certain this would be the right thing, but I think https://ngrok.com/ may be helpful here. Closing this because it has been dormant for > a year