Jordan Eldredge (@captbaritone) wrote a really helpful post about "Speeding up Laravel tests with database transactions" (http://jordaneldredge.com/blog/speed-up-laravel-tests-with-database-transactions), you should read it. I took what he had done and expanded on it a little, this is my implementation.

gistfile1.txt

As Jordan did, I changed the phpunit bootstrap file from 'bootstrap/autoload.php' to 'bootstrap/testing.php'. My version differs only in that I reference an environment variable `PHPUNIT_SEED_DB`, if that variable is present then I seed the database.

// bootstrap/testing.php

<?php

$shouldSeed = getenv('PHPUNIT_SEED_DB');
if ($shouldSeed) {
    passthru("php artisan --env='testing' migrate:refresh");
    passthru("php artisan --env='testing' db:seed --class=TestDatabaseSeeder");
}

require __DIR__ . '/autoload.php';

Doing this allows me to run the migrations on demand instead of *all the time*; helpful when I want to run a single test (or suite of tests) that don't require a database. You can set the environment variable at the time you run phpunit so it's set only for that process, kinda like flashing.

$ PHPUNIT_SEED_DB=true ./phpunit

Since I may or may not be running the migrations, I needed to conditionally start and rollback the database transactions. I modified TestCase.php, which ships with Laravel, to do this.

// tests/TestCase.php

<?php

abstract class TestCase extends Illuminate\Foundation\Testing\TestCase {

    protected static $withMigrations;

    public static function setUpBeforeClass()
    {
        parent::setUpBeforeClass();

        static::$withMigrations = getenv('PHPUNIT_SEED_DB');
    }

    public function setUp()
    {
        parent::setUp();

        if (static::$withMigrations) {
            DB::beginTransaction();
        }
    }

    public function tearDown()
    {
        if (static::$withMigrations) {
            DB::rollBack();
        }

        parent::tearDown();
    }

    // the rest

Thats it. Thanks again to Jordan for writing the post, I was tearing out what's left of my hair trying to do this on my own before I found it. Now my tests run quite a bit faster.