Laravel testing, get JSON content

In Laravel's unit test, I can test a JSON API like that:

$this->post('/user', ['name' => 'Sally'])
    ->seeJson([
        'created' => true,
    ]);

But what if I want to use the response. How can I get the JSON response (as an array) using $this->post()?

Proper way to get the content is:

$content = $this->get('/v1/users/1')->decodeResponseJson();

Currently in 5.3 this is working...

$content = $this->get('/v1/users/1')->response->getContent();

It does break the chain, however since response returns the response and not the test runner. So, you should make your chainable assertions before fetching the response, like so...

$content = $this->get('/v1/users/1')->seeStatusCode(200)->response->getContent();

I like to use the json method when working with json, instead of ->get()

$data = $this->json('GET', $url)->seeStatusCode(200)->decodeResponseJson();

As at Laravel 8, this worked for me. I was returning an automatically generated field (balance) after the POST request has created the entity. The response was in the structure {"attributes":{"balance":12345}}

$response = $this->postJson('api/v1/authors', [
	'firstName' => 'John',
	'lastName' => 'Doe',
])->assertStatus(201);

$balance = $response->decodeResponseJson()['attributes']['balance'];

decodeResponseJson will pick the response and transform it to an array for manipulation. Using getContent() returns json and you will have to use json_decode on the returned data to turn it into an array.

I hit a similar problem and could not get $this->getResponse()->getContent() working with the built in $this->get() method. I tried several variations with no success.

Instead I had to change the call to return the full http response and get the content out of that.

// Original (not working)
$content = $this->get('/v1/users/1')->getContent();

// New (working)
$content = $this->call('GET', '/v1/users/1')->getContent();

Found a better way:

$response = $this->json('POST', '/order', $data);
$responseData = $response->getOriginalContent(); // saves the response as an array
$responseData['value']  // you can now access the array values

This method returns the response json as an array.

Simple way:

$this->getJson('api/threads')->content()

Just want to share, I have used the same in $this->json() like:

$response = $this->json('POST', '/order', $data)->response->getContent();

But I added one more line to use json response and decode otherwise decodeResponseJson() was not working for me.

$json = json_decode($response);

$response = $this->json('POST', '/products', $data);
$data = $response->getData();