Sending a Referral URL to Controllers when Testing in Laravel

For some redirect functions in Laravel, such as Redirect::back(), a URL must be passed in your headers so the framework knows what URL to redirect back to. When testing routes that only redirect back to the previous URL, this can be confusing since there is no previous URL. It must be sent manually.

When using the $this->call() function in your tests, you can supply more arguments than just the method and URL. The Laravel docs explain this function in some detail. We must send an array of headers where the docs designate the $server parameter. To send a URL, you must pass an HTTP_REFERER like so:

$this->call('GET', '/event/rsvp?event_id=1', [], [], ['HTTP_REFERER' => 'http://alexsears.com']);

This will hit the URL at /event/rsvp?event_id=1. In that route, I use Redirect::back() to go back to the previous URL, which I have sent to the route as my fifth parameter. It will redirect back to my blog. It's simple!