Testing if email was sent with out sending it

There are a few ways to test mail sending without actually sending mails and without changing the application configuration.

1. Mocking the Mail facade

It is described in the Laravel documentation.

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Mail;

Mail::fake();

// Some app business here

Mail::assertSent(OrderShipped::class, function ($mail) {
    return $mail->hasTo('[email protected]');
});

It is not a very good way to test because it catches only mails sent using the Mail facade (doesn't intercept mails sent through a notification or using a mailer retrieved via dependency injection).

2. Mocking the application mailer instance

In this way all mails are intercepted because the core mailer instance is substituted.

$mailer = new \Illuminate\Support\Testing\Fakes\MailFake();
$this->app->instance('mailer', $mailer);

// Some app business here

$mailer->assertSent(OrderShipped::class, function ($mail) {
    return $mail->hasTo('[email protected]');
});

The assertions work the same way as in the facade mocking way. Unfortunately MailFake can't do any assertions with mails sent by the notification system. You can use Mockery instead of MailFake to inspect them:

$mailer = \Mockery::mock(\Illuminate\Contracts\Mail\Mailer::class);
$this->app->instance('mailer', $mailer);

$mailer->shouldReceive('send')->once()->withArgs(function (...$args) {
    // Your test here. The arguments structure differs case-to-case, so it is not a trivial stuff.
});

// Some app business here

\Mockery::close(); // Actually you don't need to call it in a Laravel test because the framework already does it

3. Mocking the mailer underlying Swift Mailer instance

This way is the most complicated but it covers all the mail sending cases and provides a single message format for testing. It also requires Mockery.

$mailer = $this->app->make('mailer');
$swiftMailer = \Mockery::mock($mailer->getSwiftMailer());
$mailer->setSwiftMailer($swiftMailer);

$swiftMailer->shouldReceive('send')->once()->withArgs(function (\Swift_Message $mail) {
    return array_key_exists('[email protected]', $mail->getTo());
});

// Some app business here

\Mockery::close(); // Actually you don't need to call it in a Laravel test because the framework already does it

4. Using the array driver

PHPUnit can change environment variables during testing, so we can change the Mail driver only for the tests and use the built-in array driver to catch the messages. This approach is simple and covers all the mail sending cases.

Make sure that your application takes the mail driver from the environment variables in config/mail.php. Example of an appropriate configuration:

// ...
'driver' => env('MAIL_DRIVER', 'smtp'),
// ...

Add the environment variable to the PHPUnit configuration (the phpunit.xml file):

<phpunit ...>
    ...
    <php>
        ...
        <env name="MAIL_DRIVER" value="array"/>
    </php>
</phpunit>

And get the «sent» messages in your tests:

// Some app business here

$emails = $this->app->make('swift.transport')->driver()->messages();

$this->assertCount($emails, 1);
$this->assertEquals(['[email protected]'], array_keys($emails[0]->getTo()));

@Finesse

Just found this after some needing to ditch Mailtrap for its ridiculous new API limits. Excellent post, I was tearing my hair out trying to find a sane and simple way to test email. Thanks.