Assert if a Laravel model exists in your tests

Testing HTTP endpoints in your Laravel application works quite conveniently, there are enough tools available to quickly set up the code to test a response and its JSON structure for example.

Besides checking for response codes, in some cases I like to check for whether a model was actually persisted in the database. Often I like this added security check on authorized destroy endpoints.

Luckily there is a method for this as well that makes it easy to check whether a model does actually exist in the database; assertModelExists().

<?php

namespace Tests\Feature\Controllers\PageController;

use App\Models\Page;
use Tests\TestCase;

class PageControllerDestroyTest extends TestCase
{
    public function test_authentication_required()
    {
        // Setup the models we need using test factories
        $page = Page::factory()->create();

        // Make the request
        $response = $this->deleteJson(route('pages.destroy', [$page->id]));

        // Make our assertions
        $response->assertStatus(401);
        $this->assertModelExists($page);
    }
}

The assertModelExists() test method makes use of the assertDatabaseHas() method and just checks whether a model exists in the database with the same primary key.