TLDR;

Testing against Smart Contracts on a test-chain is not easy to share. Ethereum-PHP comes with some tooling in order to allow also to test against pre-made Transactions.

Testing with ganach-cli with pre-made Transactions

There are basically two cases

The test just depends on a deployed contract
→ it would be sufficient to compile and deploy the contracts to the testchain

The test depends on transactions made on the testchain
→ Next to deploying and migrating you would also need to run the TX your test depends on - signing them with a private key

For the second case there is test-data delivered in the folder GanachClientDb.

Using Docker to share test Data

For testing I use a Docker based ganache-cli to start a local test-chain with pre-filled chain-data. In this setup the contracts are all ready deployed and some Transactions made where tests depend on.

https://github.com/digitaldonkey/ganache-cli-docker-compose

Using the "blocks" in the folder GanacheClientDb as data source in *ganache-cli-docker-compose/***ganache_data** you could run also tests which require transactions to be run in advance.

This dataset corresponds with the Contract data provided in vendor/tests/TestEthClient/test_contracts/truffle.js and the build vendor/tests/TestEthClient/test_contracts/build/contracts

You may use the following to get a ready test chain corresponding with this test setup.

git clone -b Ethereum-PHP-test-data https://github.com/digitaldonkey/ganache-cli-docker-compose.git
cd ganache-cli-docker-compose
docker-compose up

With default docker IP settings you should be able to run all tests as defined in phpunit.xml

Current tests depending on this setup

CallableEvents.sol

Currently only tests/TestEthClient/Unit/CallableEventsTest.php require transactions which are in this dataSet only, so you may exclude this tests when running a different Ethereum client.