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Testing with Authentication

With the authentication middleware active in your application you’ll need to simulate authentication credentials in your integration tests. First, ensure that your controller or middleware tests are using the IntegrationTestTrait:

// In a controller test.
use Cake\TestSuite\IntegrationTestTrait;
use Cake\TestSuite\TestCase;

class ArticlesControllerTest extends TestCase
{
    use IntegrationTestTrait;

    // Test methods and helpers to follow.
}

Based on the type of authentication you’re using you will need to simulate credentials differently. Lets review a few more common types of authentication.

Session based authentication

Session based authentication requires simulating the User data that normally would be found in the session. In your test cases you can define a helper method that lets you ‘login’:

protected function login($userId = 1)
{
    $users = TableRegistry::getTableLocator()->get('Users');
    $user = $users->get($userId);
    $this->session(['Auth' => $user]);
}

In your integration tests you can use login() to simulate a user being logged in:

public function testGet()
{
    $this->login();
    $this->get('/bookmarks/1');
    $this->assertResponseOk();
}

Token based authentication

With token based authentication you need to simulate the Authorization header. After getting valid token setup the request:

public function testGet()
{
    $token = $this->getToken();
    $this->configRequest([
        'headers' => ['Authorization' => 'Bearer ' . $token]
    ]);
    $this->get('/api/bookmarks');
    $this->assertResponseOk();
}

Basic/Digest based authentication

When testing Basic or Digest Authentication, you can add the environment variables that PHP creates automatically.:

public function testGet()
{
     $this->configRequest([
         'environment' => [
             'PHP_AUTH_USER' => 'username',
             'PHP_AUTH_PW' => 'password',
         ]
     ]);
    $this->get('/api/bookmarks');
    $this->assertResponseOk();
}