how tu simulate a request without call a controller? This article give a solution even his basic idea is to fast the controller unit test. For example, if we need to test a service which is called by a controller. In the service we have some parmeters from the request, or have a request as parameter, so we need to generate the container before test this service. But the normal way of symfony2 unit test you need to generate a client and then send them to controller, so we need to find a way directly inject our container to the service. http://leftnode.com/entry/faster-symfony2-tests.html see this. namespace Acme\DemoBundle\Tests\Unit\Controller; use Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Test\WebTestCase; use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request; class ControllerTest extends WebTestCase { public function testControllerAction() { $client = static::createClient(); $container = $client->getKernel() ->getContainer(); $request = new ...