#behat

What Is A Virtual #Moodle Development Environment? #MoodleNews

Imagine the most diverse team of Moodle designers, developers, and educators. They come from all walks of life. Now think about which kind of laptops they use. The chances they all have the same system settings are pretty slim. How can they properly collaborate from their own vantage points? Since the 1960s, the field of computer science has sworn by one solution: Virtualization. It defines the…

For those of you the have not encountered it, Behat is a framework for automated testing and behaviour driven development (BDD). As part of this installation we will also add the Mink extension to Behat that will provide a library of the most common predefined test steps and automation via a browser (e.g. Google Chrome).

Why Behat? For starters, it’s free and has a tiny footprint.  It can also run on any operating system. Behat uses cucumber like syntax (readable English) to structure its tests making them definable and readable for a non-developer.  There are also several add-ons for specific web applications (e.g. Drupal, WordPress, Moodle, etc.). Most importantly it speeds up the development and modification of test packs.

When I first started to use Behat, I could not find a definitive guide to installing Behat within a Windows environment.  Although installing it is not difficult, I thought I would produce a  quick guide to getting it implemented in 30 minutes.

Generating Gherkin step definitions from Codeception modules 01

Introduction to the generation of Gherkin step definitions from Codeception modules using the Steppify command. Not just WordPress While in the example below I’m using WordPress specific modules from the wp-browser package the steppify command will work with any Codeception module. Setup Before any acceptance test runs here is the project setup: a web-server to serve a WordPress installation at…

wp-cli command options gotcha

A quick wp-cli command gotcha. Command flags wp-cli allows for very flexible and powerful commands to be put in place and its cookbook does a good job of going over the possibilities offered to package developers. But I’ll admit I’ve skimmed the cookbook to jump into the code to the point that I’ve missed the “--no-option cast” completely. An example In the code I’m working on the user can tell…

WPBrowser scaffold WP-CLI command 05

Mocking calls to shell commands in Behat tests. Context The context of the post is my ongoing effort to develop a wp-cli package to allow users to interactively scaffold tests for WordPress plugins and themes based on Codeception and wp-browser. The scaffolding consists in creating some files like a Composer configuration file and then launching commands like composer update or wpcept boostrap…

WPBrowser scaffold WP-CLI command 04

Mocking the user input while testing a WP CLI command with Behat. Not everything can be an option The wp-cli tool allows for a degree of interactivity that goes beyond passing everything as an option. A command like wp core install will require some options to work and those will have to be specified inline with the command like this: wp core install --url="http://example.com" --title="Example…

Running single scenarios in Behat

A simple way to run a work-in-progress scenario in Behat. Running tagged tests Behat is a “php framework for autotesting your business expectations” and as any test suite it packs a degree of flexibility to run specific tests (“scenarios” in Gherkin terms) that represent a group of related features. Where Codeception allows running a single test method in a test case like this: codecept run…

WPBrowser scaffold WP-CLI command 02

Mocking the world in Behat while developing a wp-cli command. I need Composer The Composer dependency management tool is a centerpiece of my daily development drill; as such it’s globally available on my machine using the composer alias. The wp-cli command package I’m trying to develop aims at streamlining the scaffolding of a plugin or theme wp-browser managed tests easier; on a macro level what…