Lanre Adelowo has a recent post to his site introducing you to some of the basics of "mocking" in unit testing, some of the reasons to use it and plenty of examples of it in action using the Mockery library.

Mocking is simply the process of replacing an object with a fake that can act as a replacement. [...] The major reasons why we mock are Dependency elimination and removal of side effects. Think things like databases, 3rd party API requests and network requests, code that has to hit the filesystem.

This stuffs aren’t always guaranteed to be available or can prove tedious to set up (an internet connection for example) and even when they are (a logger that writes to the filesystem for example), they always tend to make your tests run extremely slow.

After covering some of the basics of mocking he talks about how they differ from stubs and how to get Mockery installed. He illustrates some of the basics concepts with a "user search" functionality based on a API request to GitHub. He's writing the results to the file system (via a Logger) so this is the main target of the mock. He creates a mock "FileSystem" class the Logger is refactored to use. He then mocks this dependency out and defines a "shouldReceive" handler for the call to write the log. This replaces the need for the test to write to the file system and makes it possible to test things in isolation rather than relying on the environment.