Hi, we are going to see some helpful methods to test an API.

Authenticate with API driver:

$this->actingAs(factory(User::class)->create(), 'api');

Hit an endpoint:

// instead of $this->post('/api/users', []);
// do this
$this->json('post', '/api/users' ,[])

An advantage of using this method is that at the background Laravel validate if a request require a json response (if request is an ajax request) or it requires an http request.

If you use the "json" method you can get the "validations/form request" messages as json, so it is easy to test what you need to return to an ajax/fetch request;

Get response

This is a very helpful method, to see the response in json format you can use:

$response = $this->json('get', '/api/users');
dd($response->getContent());

Thats all, I love short posts, you are welcome to comment, thanks for reading.