Unit Testing WordPress Plugin Uninstallation

If you’re a WordPress plugin developer, there are two things that you should probably be doing. First, you should be writing your plugin with an uninstall routine to clean everything up when a user decides to remove it. Second, you should be unit testing your plugin, to make sure that everything is working. Actually, we could go a step further: You should be unit testing your plugin’s uninstallation script. It kind of follows naturally doesn’t it?

I thought so, so I created a set of tools to make that easier: the WP Plugin Uninstall Tester

From the project README:

The purpose of this testcase is to allow you to make plugin uninstall testing as realistic as possible. WordPress uninstalls plugins when they aren’t active, and these tools allow you simulate that. The installation is performed remotely, so the plugin is not loaded when the tests are being run.

I created these tools after finding that there was a fatal error in one of my plugin’s uninstall scripts. Not that I didn’t have unit tests for uninstallation. I did. But the uninstall tests were being run with the plugin already loaded. So I never realized that I was calling one of the plugin’s functions that wouldn’t normally be available. That’s when I decided to create these testing tools, so my uninstall tests would fail if I wasn’t including all required dependencies in my plugin’s uninstall script.

In addition to providing a realistic uninstall testing environment, it also provides some assertions to help you make sure that your plugin entirely cleaned up the database.

That basically sums up the project. I encourage you to add it to your plugin’s test suite. And it’s hosted on GitHub, so you’re welcome to help make it even better.

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