Sebastian Göttschkes has a new post to his site showing you how to test secure pages within your Symfony2 applications using a simple "requestWithAuth" method.

If you develop a web application, more often than not you have some kind of user section or admin panel where some kind of login identifies the user and protects your actions against usage from unauthorized people. It can be difficult to do functional tests with this kind of pages as you need to simulate some session or cookie context. In this tutorial, I want to show you how to test your functional pages with symfony2 and phpunit.

He includes a "bad way" to do it, cheating by making a client and feeding it the HTTP auth credentials, and a more correct way involving the "requestWithAuth" method that's called whenever the "request" is called to push those credentials along with every request. Code for this basic function is included.