Setup and Teardown the Database Once Per Test Suite in PHPUnit

I'm working on a series of integration tests where I want to set up and reset the database for each run. This could easily be done in the setUp and tearDown methods, but doing the full db each time is slow. Yes, I could just do the tables I need, but I was curious, and now I don't have to worry about which tables are setup in my testing DB. In this example, I'm using Laravel's migrations and SQLite as the test DB.

UPDATE 05/05/2016: As Sebastian points out below (thanks!) there is a much more appropriate way. Using setUpBeforeClass and tearDownAfterClass we achieve the same effect

public static function setUpBeforeClass()
{
    parent::setUpBeforeClass();
    exec('php artisan migrate --database sqlite_test');
}

public static function tearDownAfterClass()
{
    exec('php artisan migrate:reset --database sqlite_test');
    parent::tearDownAfterClass(); 
}

PHPUnit has listeners that you can tap into at various parts of your tests' lifecycle. I'm particularly interested in when a specific suite starts and ends. We'll need to do 2 things:

1. Create our Listener
2. Register this Listener in phpunit.xml

The listener is as follows:

class FullDBListener extends PHPUnit_Framework_BaseTestListener
{
    protected $suites = ['UserIntegrationTest', 'AccountIntegrationTest'];

    public function startTestSuite(PHPUnit_Framework_TestSuite $suite)
    {
        if (in_array($suite->getName(), $this->suites)) {
            exec('php artisan migrate --database sqlite_test');
        }
    }

    public function endTestSuite(PHPUnit_Framework_TestSuite $suite)
    {
        if (in_array($suite->getName(), $this->suites)) {
            exec('php artisan migrate:reset --database sqlite_test');
        }
    }
}

This does a few things:

1. Stores the class names of each suite we want to run the db migrations for
2. In startTestSuite it checks to see if we're in the right suite
3. If we are, run an artisan migration on our test db
4. In endTestSuite it checks to see if we're in the right suite
5. If we are, run an artisan migration:reset on our test db

Next, we need to make PHPUnit aware of this listener. Update your path accordingly

<listeners>
    <listener class="FullDBListener" file="./tests/app/FullDBListener.php"></listener>
</listeners>

That's it!

I do do some basic teardown in my test suite's setUp method to give me a blank slate. This has proven faster then doing the migrations each time

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

    User::truncate();
}

I hope this helped you, if you have any questions, let me know!