README

Mock global php functions

This library allows you to mock any global PHP functions to return predefined values.

This library was created after I saw implementation of Symfony's ClockMock component for mocking PHP native functions related to time. I was curious how to make a mechanism for mocking any PHP global function, so I created this small library.

This is achieved by PHP's namespace fallback policy:

PHP will fall back to global functions […] if a namespaced function […] does not exist.

Library uses mentioned feature to dynamically create namespaced function. For this library to work your code that you are testing should be in non global namespace context and call function unqualified. For example:

namespace foo;

$time = time(); // This call can be mocked, a call to \time() can't.

Known limitations

• Only unqualified function calls in a namespace context can be mocked. For example a call for time() in the namespace foo is mockable, a call for \time() is not.
• The mock has to be defined before the first call to the unqualified function in the tested class. This is documented in Bug #68541. In most cases, you can ignore this limitation as you only need to define a mock before any testing in your tests. It's also recommend that you run your tests as isolated process.

Api

At the moment there are 2 mocking objects that developers can use:

• MockFunction - mock any given function with your own anonymous function
• FreezeClock - mock time/sleep/date related functions, so they are in sync

MockFunction

Object that can mock any function from global namespace. Mock is active as long as magic method __destruct is not called on that mock, or it's disabled manually via disable method. In that way you do not need to manually turn off mock while writing tests, because as soon as current scope exists, mock is disabled, and you have clean slate.

Note: When creating mock use static callback instead of regular one. This prevents them from having the current class automatically bound to them.

Example:

// mock is active as soon it's defined
$mock = new MockFunction('app', 'rand', static function(){
    return 5;
});

namespace app {
    // some logic
    $randomNumber = rand(); // random number will be always 5
    // some logic
}

Example of mocking sleep function:

$mock = new MockFunction('app', 'sleep', static function(){
    return 0;
});

namespace app {
    // some logic
    sleep(100); // sleep will not wait for 100 seconds as function is mocked
    // some logic
}

FreezeClock

Handy object that can freeze time in given namespace.

Handy factory methods:

• atZero - stops time at timestamp 0
• atTime - stops time at provided time
• atMicrotime - stops time at provided microtime
• atNow - stops at current time

Functions affected:

• date - returns freeze formatted time
• time - return freeze time
• microtime - return freeze microtime
• sleep - increase freeze time and it's not blocking like regular sleep function
• usleep - increase freeze time and it's not blocking like regular usleep function

use Robier\MockGlobalFunction\FreezeClock;

$mock = new FreezeClock::atZero('app/testNamespace');

\app\testNamespace\sleep(15);

\app\testNamespace\time(); // would return 15
\app\testNamespace\microtime(true); // would return 15.0 also

Tests

First run docker/build to build a container and then docker/run composer run test for running all tests.

Contribution

Feel free to contribute!