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How to Test Doctrine Repositories

Unit testing Doctrine repositories in a Symfony project is not recommended. When you're dealing with a repository, you're really dealing with something that's meant to be tested against a real database connection.

Fortunately, you can easily test your queries against a real database, as described below.

Functional Testing

If you need to actually execute a query, you will need to boot the kernel to get a valid connection. In this case, you'll extend the KernelTestCase to have the Symfony environment available:

// tests/Repository/ProductRepositoryTest.php
namespace App\Tests\Repository;

use App\Entity\Product;
use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Test\KernelTestCase;

class ProductRepositoryTest extends KernelTestCase
{
    /**
     * @var \Doctrine\ORM\EntityManager
     */
    private $entityManager;

    /**
     * {@inheritDoc}
     */
    protected function setUp()
    {
        $kernel = self::bootKernel();

        $this->entityManager = $kernel->getContainer()
            ->get('doctrine')
            ->getManager();
    }

    public function testSearchByCategoryName()
    {
        $products = $this->entityManager
            ->getRepository(Product::class)
            ->searchByCategoryName('foo')
        ;

        $this->assertCount(1, $products);
    }

    /**
     * {@inheritDoc}
     */
    protected function tearDown()
    {
        parent::tearDown();

        $this->entityManager->close();
        $this->entityManager = null; // avoid memory leaks
    }
}