Check if a Signed URL is Valid in Laravel Tests

Introduction

There may be times when you want to check whether a URL in your Laravel application is a valid signed URL. Most of the time, this is something you'd need to do in your application code where you can reach for the \Illuminate\Routing\Middleware\ValidateSignature middleware class, or the $request->hasValidSignature() method on the Illuminate\Http\Request class.

However, in the past, I've needed to write some tests to ensure that a signed URL is correctly generated and stored in the database. Admittedly, it's not something I need to do often, but I thought it might be useful to share how to do this in case you find yourself in a similar situation.

In this Quickfire article, I'm going to show you how to check whether a signed URL is valid in your tests.

If you're not familiar with signed URLs, you might be interested in my existing article which explains what they are: How to Assert Redirects to Signed URLs in Laravel Tests

Checking if a Signed URL is Valid in Laravel Tests

Let's imagine we're building a Laravel application that allows users to invite other users to join their team. When a user invites another user, we'll assume a new team_invitation_url field is created on an App\Models\Invitation model, which contains a signed URL that the invitee can use to join the team.

Note: You'd likely use a different approach than storing the hardcoded URL in the database. But this example is purely to demonstrate how to check if a signed URL is valid.

To check if the team_invitation_url is a valid signed URL, we need to create an instance of the Illuminate\Http\Request class using the URL stored in the team_invitation_url field. Then, we can use the hasValidSignature method to check if the URL is valid:

use Illuminate\Http\Request;

$isValid = Request::create($invitation->team_invitation_url)->hasValidSignature();

If the URL is in fact a valid signed URL, the $isValid variable will be true. Otherwise, if the URL is not a valid signed URL or has expired, it will be false.

Let's take a look at how we could use this in an example test case:

use App\Actions\InviteUserToTeamAction;
use App\Models\User;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use PHPUnit\Framework\Attributes\Test;
use Tests\TestCase;

class UserTest extends TestCase
{
    #[Test]
    public function user_can_be_invited(): void
    {
        // Create a user and another user to invite.
        $user = User::factory()->create();
        $userToInvite = User::factory()->create();

        // Call the action to invite the user.
        // The action will return an instance of `App\Models\Invitation`.
        $invitation = new InviteUserToTeamAction()->execute(
            user: $user,
            userToInvite: $userToInvite
        );

        // Other assertions to check the user was invited correctly...

        // Assert the `team_invitation_url` is a valid signed URL.
        $this->assertTrue(
            Request::create($invitation->team_invitation_url)->hasValidSignature(),
        );
    }
}

As we can see in the example test above, we're inviting a user to a team using an App\Actions\InviteUserToTeamAction action. After the user is invited, we're then asserting that the team_invitation_url is a valid signed URL using the hasValidSignature method on the Illuminate\Http\Request instance created from the URL.

As a result of this assertion, we can have confidence that we're generating valid signed URLs in our application.

Conclusion

In this Quickfire article, we've taken a quick look at how to check whether a signed URL is valid in your Laravel tests.

If you enjoyed reading this post, you might be interested in checking out my 220+ page ebook "Battle Ready Laravel" which covers similar topics in more depth.

Or, you might want to check out my other 440+ page ebook "Consuming APIs in Laravel" which teaches you how to use Laravel to consume APIs from other services.

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