Comments on: PHPUnit email integration testing using Sendmail

By: Žilvinas Šaltys

Žilvinas Šaltys — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 11:48:52 +0000

Nice idea. We’ve replaced the test-mail sendmail solution with a different idea. When running phpunit test suite we pass a -d flag overriding the sendmail path to a php script. The php script writes to a known location on the file system. The tests then assert against that file on the filesystem.

By: Andrei Fedarenchyk

Andrei Fedarenchyk — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 09:35:47 +0000

Solution how to test emails within frameworks like ZF:
http://www.andfed.net/2010/11/07/zend-framework-and-phpunit-emails-testing/

By: Tadas

Tadas — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 16:03:54 +0000

Well.. Another solution: use sendmail wrapper, configure php (sendmail_path) to use it for testsuite via .htaccess (or feed custom config file if tests are executed via cli).

There are some php written scripts that behave like /usr/sbin/sendmail and output mails straight to file system or whatever you make it to ouput to.

By: Žilvinas Šaltys

Žilvinas Šaltys — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:45:05 +0000

Thanks for your feedback Tadas. The only small problem with this this is if you have a build server which would most likely be running Linux. Which would probably would have an smtp server (probably sendmail) which is used to run other PHP scripts and possibly send legitimate emails (that’s our case). Then you get a conflict in the php.ini configuration which by default uses sendmail which you would want to change to your smtpd server. I guess it should be possible to tell sendmail to forward certain emails to the debugging smtp server.

By: Tadas

Tadas — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 13:27:18 +0000

Lots of people develop in ms windows environment + use various other MTAs on servers so this is quite limited solution. Easy and portable solution for testing this could be Python smtpd library which allows implementing minimal debugging smtp server in 10-20 lines of code.

Documentation: http://docs.python.org/library/smtpd.html