Laravel running tests as different users - php

Question

I am using Laravel 5.1 and I am trying to test my controllers.
I have several roles for my users and policies defined for different actions. Firstly, each of the requests needs to be made by an authenticated user, so running a test with no user returns a 401 Unauthorized, as expected.
But when I want to test the functionality for authorized users, I still get the 401 Unauthorized status code.
It may be worth mentioning that I use basic stateless HTTP authentication on these controllers.
I have tried the following:
public function testViewAllUsersAsAdmin()
{
$user = UserRepositoryTest::createTestAdmin();
Auth::login($user);
$response = $this->call('GET', route('users.index'));
$this->assertEquals($response->getStatusCode(), Response::HTTP_OK);
}
and
public function testViewAllUsersAsAdmin()
{
$user = UserRepositoryTest::createTestAdmin();
$response = $this->actingAs($user)
->call('GET', route('users.index'));
$this->assertEquals($response->getStatusCode(), Response::HTTP_OK);
}
and also this (in case there was anything wrong with my new user, which there shouldn't be)
public function testViewAllUsersAsAdmin()
{
$user = User::find(1);
$response = $this->actingAs($user)
->call('GET', route('users.index'));
$this->assertEquals($response->getStatusCode(), Response::HTTP_OK);
}
but in every case I get a 401 response code so my tests fail.
I can access the routes fine using postman when logging in as a dummy user.
I am running out of ideas, so any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You need to add Session::start() in the setUp function or in the beginning of the function which user need to log in.
public function setUp()
{
parent::setUp();
Session::start();
}
or
public function testViewAllUsersAsAdmin()
{
Session::start();
$user = UserRepositoryTest::createTestAdmin();
Auth::login($user);
$response = $this->call('GET', route('users.index'));
$this->assertEquals(Response::HTTP_OK, $response->getStatusCode());
}

Answer 2

Through some experimentation, I found that the problem lay inside my authentication middleware. Since I want the API to be stateless, the authentication looks like this:
public function handle($request, Closure $next)
{
return Auth::onceBasic() ?: $next($request);
}
And apparently, it's not possible to authenticate a user the way I was doing it.
My solution was simply to disable the middleware, using the WithoutMiddleware trait or $this->withoutMiddleware() at the beginning of each test.