Behat Stepler

Simple behat extension which lets you run just specific gherkin step form CLI.

Why?

Gherkin gives us unified way to describe business requirements, but what if we want E2E tests? Let's pretend that we have project with several components: iOS application, Android application, single-page application frontend and API on backend. For all listed components there is a great tools: cucumber.js, calabash, behat. But if you'll start implement E2E tests you'll face a little problem: most of scenarios have some preconditions, which should be set on backend.

So... what does this extension? It just provide you a way to execute specific step anytime you want. For example, you can implement steps required by preconditions in behat, and then just call this steps from your cucumber.js suites for example.

Usage

You can install this extension via composer:

$ composer require --dev fesor/behat-stepler

Then you'll need to add extension into your behat.yml:

default:
    suites:
        default:
            contexts:
              - FeatureContext
    extensions:
        Fesor\Stepler:

That's it. Now you can call just single step:

$ behat --run-steps "Alice have user account:
| email    | alice@example.com    |
| password | alice_password       |"

Step execution results

Sometime useful to get results of executed step. Given you have step definition, which creates new user. Often you need to get ID of created user (for interaction with API for example). This step definition would looks something like this:

/**
 * @Given :name have account
 */
public function createUser($name) 
{
    $user = $this->fakeUserFactory($name);
    $this->userRepository->add($user);
    
    return $user->getDTO();
}

Then, if we run this step with --return-step-results option:

$ behat --run-steps "Bob have account" --return-step-result

We will get something like this:

{"id": 1, "name": "Bob"}

Data will be serialized with json_encode, so you should return some kind of DTO, which can be easly serialized into JSON (arrays, simple objects of objects which implements JsonSerializable interface).

Hooks

Please not that only BeforeStep and AfterStep hooks are available. If you want to clear your database for example, the workaround for this will be specific step that will purge all test data.

Contribution

Feel free to contribute! Any help or ideas will be useful!