On the Laravel News site today there's a tutorial posted showing you how to test your middleware with HTTP tests and how they can help in more practical testing of your application.

In this post, I’d like to demonstrate a practical example of testing a middleware using HTTP tests. Testing at the HTTP level can make your tests more resilient to change and more readable.

On a recent episode of Full Stack Radio (#72) with Adam Wathan and Taylor Otwell, it was refreshing to hear them find a lot of practical value in HTTP testing. I have found HTTP tests to be easier to write and maintain, but did feel like I was Doing Testing Wrong™ somehow or that I was cheating by not mocking and isolating everything. If you haven’t listened to this episode yet, give it a listen, it’s full of good, practical testing advice.

He starts by laying out the example middleware he wanted to test, one for validating and securing webhooks coming back from the Mailgun service to handle incoming email. The code for the middleware is included, defining the handle, buildSignature and verify methods. He then uses the artisan command to make a test and provides the code to test and ensure that the middleware forbids requests that aren't POST.