The Mix manifest does not exist when using orchestral/testbench

Creating a custom Laravel package using the orchestral/testbench package that helps package developer to help with PHPUnit test. So, my package on a different place and not in a Laravel installation exactly. Everything works great except the mix() function that I’m using on the blade view for resources.

<script src="{{ asset(mix('js/app.js', 'vendor/trade')) }}"></script>

And, I have the following test route set in the web.php:

<?php

use IlluminateSupportFacadesRoute;

Route::get('/', function() {
    return view('trade::_layouts.app');
});

In addition, I have the following feature test in the ExampleTest.php file:

public function testBasicTest()
{
    $response = $this->get('/');

    $response->assertStatus(200);
}

When I am running phpunit I am seeing the following error:

Expected status code 200 but received 500.
Failed asserting that false is true.

After dumping the $response in the test, I see the The Mix manifest does not exist. error. After digging for an hour I found that mix() helper function is looking for the mix-manifest.json in the orchestral/testbench package located under the vendor instead of the public folder in my package.

I tried to the following in the package ServiceProvider.php but didn’t work either:

$this->app->bind('path.public', function() {
    return base_path().'/../public';
});

In addition, I see the laravel/horizon package also using the mix() helper function on the layout.blade.php file as I am doing right now and it is also using the orchestral/testbench package for the test. So, how horizon package is doing the test while I can’t? What is the to override mix() helper to ensure the public path is on my package public path instead of the orchestral/testbench path?

Answer

There are two ways to override the public_path() returned path to ensure the mix() function can find the mix-manifest.json file.

1. One would be to override the public_path() method completely to the custom package. Laravel usage if (!function_exists()) {} before declaring any function which is good as we can define our own public_path() function in our package. However, we’ll need to make sure that our override function loads before the Laravel helper method and that’s another topic.
2. The easiest way would be to change the path.public from Laravel IoC Container from the particular PHPUnit test where we’re having the issue.

public function testBasicTest()
{
    $this->app->instance('path.public', $packagePublicDir);

    $response = $this->get('/');

    $response->assertStatus(200);
}