Fixtures console flow

Fixtures are important part of testing. Their main purpose is to populate you with data that needed by testing different cases. With this data using your tests becoming more efficient and useful.

Yii supports fixtures via the yii fixture command line tool. This tool supports:

Loading fixtures to different storages such as: database, nosql, etc;
Unloading fixtures in different ways (usually it is clearing storage);
Auto-generating fixtures and populating it with random data.

Fixtures format

Fixtures are objects with different methods and configurations, refer to official documentation on them. Lets assume we have fixtures data to load:

#users.php file under fixtures data path, by default @tests\unit\fixtures\data

return [
	[
		'name' => 'Chase',
		'login' => 'lmayert',
		'email' => 'strosin.vernice@jerde.com',
		'auth_key' => 'K3nF70it7tzNsHddEiq0BZ0i-OU8S3xV',
		'password' => '$2y$13$WSyE5hHsG1rWN2jV8LRHzubilrCLI5Ev/iK0r3jRuwQEs2ldRu.a2',
	],
	[
		'name' => 'Celestine',
		'login' => 'napoleon69',
		'email' => 'aileen.barton@heaneyschumm.com',
		'auth_key' => 'dZlXsVnIDgIzFgX4EduAqkEPuphhOh9q',
		'password' => '$2y$13$kkgpvJ8lnjKo8RuoR30ay.RjDf15bMcHIF7Vz1zz/6viYG5xJExU6',
	],
];

If we are using fixture that loads data into database then these rows will be applied to users table. If we are using nosql fixtures, for example mongodb fixture, then this data will be applied to users mongodb collection. In order to learn about implementing various loading strategies and more, refer to official documentation. Above fixture example was auto-generated by yii2-faker extension, read more about it in these section. Fixture classes name should not be plural.

Loading fixtures

Fixture classes should be suffixed by Fixture class. By default fixtures will be searched under tests\unit\fixtures namespace, you can change this behavior with config or command options.

To apply fixture, run the following command:

yii fixture/apply <fixture_name>

The required fixture_name parameter specifies a fixture name which data will be loaded. You can load several fixtures at once. Below are correct formats of this command:

// apply `users` fixture
yii fixture/apply User

// same as above, because default action of "fixture" command is "apply"
yii fixture User

// apply several fixtures. Note that there should not be any whitespace between ",", it should be one string.
yii fixture User,UserProfile

// apply all fixtures
yii fixture/apply all

// same as above
yii fixture all

// apply fixtures, but for other database connection.
yii fixtures User --db='customDbConnectionId'

// apply fixtures, but search them in different namespace. By default namespace is: tests\unit\fixtures.
yii fixtures User --namespace='alias\my\custom\namespace'

Unloading fixtures

To unload fixture, run the following command:

// unload Users fixture, by default it will clear fixture storage (for example "users" table, or "users" collection if this is mongodb fixture).
yii fixture/clear User

// Unload several fixtures. Note that there should not be any whitespace between ",", it should be one string.
yii fixture/clear User,UserProfile

// unload all fixtures
yii fixture/clear all

Same command options like: db, namespace also can be applied to this command.

Configure Command Globally

While command line options allow us to configure the migration command on-the-fly, sometimes we may want to configure the command once for all. For example you can configure different migration path as follows:

'controllerMap' => [
    'fixture' => [
        'class' => 'yii\console\FixtureController',
		'db' => 'customDbConnectionId',
		'namespace' => 'myalias\some\custom\namespace',
    ],
]

Auto-generating fixtures

Yii also can auto-generate fixtures for you based on some template. You can generate your fixtures with different data on different languages and formats. These feature is done by Faker library and yii2-faker extension. See extension guide for more docs.

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