Create a manual symfony 2 request and response object from a command - php

Question

I'm attempting to write a symfony 2 command which can basically read in a number of routes (either through a yml file or through arguments) and can go and get the response for each of these pages so I can report back whether they came back as 200/404/502 etc..
The routes are relative so would be routes such as '/' and '/news'.
Can't seem to work out how to send these requests through to get a real response, I can use Request::create() to create a request, but this doesn't seem to work how I want it to.
Do I have to go through the Kernel even though its a command? Any help would be appreciated.
What I have so far:
$request = Request::create('/news', 'GET');
$response = new Response();
$response->prepare($request);
$res = $response->send();
var_dump($res->getContent());
This comes back with an empty string all the time.
Also tried the following:
$client = new Client(
new HttpKernel(new EventDispatcher(), new ControllerResolver())
);
$client->request('GET', '/news');
var_dump($client->getResponse());
Which comes back with a route is wrongly configured error
Thanks
Kevin

Answer 1

According to your comment:
Basically im testing the code base to ensure its all set up ok before I release it to the public, so I want to simulate a client request to the code and ensure I get a 200 response back, if a 404 came back then I know there is a problem so to pause the release.
This is easy to do with a test:
<?php
// tests/AppBundle/Controller/PostControllerTest.php
namespace Tests\AppBundle\Controller;
use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Test\WebTestCase;
class PostControllerTest extends WebTestCase
{
public function testNews()
{
$client = static::createClient();
$crawler = $client->request('GET', '/news');
// Assert a specific 200 status code
$this->assertEquals(
200, // or Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response::HTTP_OK
$client->getResponse()->getStatusCode()
);
}
}
You also need to install PHPUnit:
composer require --dev "phpunit/phpunit=5.4.*"
Then you can launch the tests:
php ./vendor/bin/phpunit -c app/phpunit.xml.dist
You'll have a result like this:
PHPUnit 5.4.6 by Sebastian Bergmann and contributors.
..................... 21 / 21 (100%)
Time: 5.29 seconds, Memory: 58.00MB
OK (21 tests, 149 assertions)

Answer 2

The best way to do it is using an http client to which transfer the responsibility to create a request object, perform the request, and return a response.
One of the most used is the guzzle http client (http://docs.guzzlephp.org/en/latest/)
So in your command you can get the router from the container, generate the url for that, and perform the request with guzzle client.
EDIT after comments:
To reach that goal to perform request without actually have a server running, you can use \Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Client object that uses the kernel to perform request-response ( you have of course to inject the current kernel of your command). Pretty much as the WebTestCase class does.
http://api.symfony.com/2.8/Symfony/Bundle/FrameworkBundle/Client.html
Hope this will help ! (I will update with some code later)