Problem:

We are writing custom endpoints and routes that extend WP API in a theme or plugin. We want to write tests for this code and run tests in Travis CI. Right now, WP API is not in WordPress core and must be included as a plugin. Therefore, we have a WordPress plugin/theme that depends on another plugin. We want to make sure all our dependencies are installed/included when we bootstrap our testing suite. WP API is not a registered Composer package.

Bad Solution #1:

Complain about WP API not being a registered Composer package. Just joking. The reason behind this is that WP API must remain backwards compatible after being included in WordPress core.

Bad Solution #2:

Include WP API in your theme/plugin as a Git submodule. Not only are Git submodules annoying but this doesn’t even make sense. Git submodules point to a specific commit. We want to just install the latest stable version which isn’t possible using submodules unless we want to manually update our submodule commit hash every time WP API is updated.

Final Solution

We need to manually include WP API in our plugin/theme but we want it up-to-date. We want to pretend WP API is a Composer package. If it’s not already there, create a folder vendor/ in the root of your project. This is the same folder that Composer will store your packages. Add vendor/ to your .gitignore since we don’t need this code in production (assuming you don’t have other packages in vendor that are needed in production).

We can execute bash scripts whenever Composer install/update is called. Let’s write a simple Bash script to clone/update WP API into vendor/. Place this code in bin/install-wp-api.sh:

cloneOutput=$(git clone https://github.com/WP-API/WP-API.git ./vendor/wp-api 2>&1)

if [[ $cloneOutput =~ "destination path './vendor/wp-api' already exists" ]]; then
  cd vendor/wp-api
  git reset --hard &>/dev/null
  git checkout master &>/dev/null
  git reset --hard &>/dev/null
  git pull origin master &>/dev/null
fi

This script will clone WP API, if it doesn’t exist. Otherwise it will checkout the master branch and pull the latest from Github.

Now we need to execute this script. We will use Composer scripts. Here is an example composer.json file:

{
    "name": "tlovett1/package-name",
    "description": "Description of my package.",
    "license": "MIT",
    "authors": [
        {
            "name": "Taylor Lovett",
            "email": "email@email.com"
        }
    ],
    "minimum-stability": "stable",
    "require": {},
    "scripts": {
        "pre-install-cmd": [
            "./bin/install-wp-api.sh"
        ],
        "pre-update-cmd": [
            "./bin/install-wp-api.sh"
        ]
    }
}

composer.json defines your package as a Composer package, registers it’s dependancies, and more. As I mentioned before, we can call scripts as well. We use the pre-install-cmd hook to execute our script every time composer install is called. We use the pre-update-cmd hook to execute our script every time composer update is called. On both of these hooks we are executing our script at ./bin/install-wp-api.sh.

Now we simply add the following to our .travis.yml file:

before_script:
   - composer install

In your test suite bootstrap file, you can insert the following PHP to manually use WP API assuming you are using the WordPress standard unit testing suite:

function _manually_load_plugin() {
	require( dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/../vendor/wp-api/plugin.php' );
}
tests_add_filter( 'muplugins_loaded', '_manually_load_plugin' );

EDIT: Another solution which is easier than this one is using a composer inline package.