CakeBehat is shell for testing CakePHP Application by Behat

Copyright© 2011 Sizuhiko. Licensed under the MIT license.

Overview

Behat is PHP version clone of famous BDD framework cucumber in Ruby on Rails.
The advantage are followings:

• Customer are able to read & understand because the scenarios written by the natural language
• Scenario is executable as test !

The test of a current CakePHP application
1. SimpleTest in the unit test
2. Selenium might have been used in the test of the browser base.
And, it became possible to be doing the acceptance test (In customer’s word) by Behat/Mink in the future.

However, Behat is Symfony base, and, up to now, the plug-in etc. to execute the application of CakePHP have not been prepared.

Then, the shell task of executing it by “cake behat” like “rake cucumber” was made.
It is “CakeBehat” shell.

Usage

Require

• PHPUnit
• CakePHP 2.0 or later
• The data base such as MySQL must be installed, and the data base for the test must be prepared.
• PHP 5.3.2 or later
• Behat 2.1.3 and Mink (auto install by CakeBehat.init)

Install

Under the plugins directory of CakePHP root, execute the following commands.

cd plugins
git clone git@github.com:sizuhiko/CakeBehat.git
cd ..

Then, add the following code in app/Config/bootstrap.php

CakePlugin::load('CakeBehat');

Next, the following commands are executed. (on root of CakePHP)

ls
  app  index.php  lib  plugins  vendors

lib/Cake/Console/cake CakeBehat.init

The initial install is an end.

Configuration

Setting your application root url into behat.yml.

app/Config/behat.yml

base_url: http://test.localhost:8888/application-name/

This specifies the host name, the port number, and the application name, etc. by the one to set passing the route of the application. Setting it to the host name that can be identified to the test environment as much as possible is recommended.

Do you end by this?

A basic environmental setting ends by this. Behat is an executable situation.

Your application database settings.

An initial value of config/database.php is $default.
When UnitTest is executed, $test might already been defined.
Behat/Mink is executed by the browser access. Data base ($test) for the test cannot access to without the change in the setting.

When test step registers the test data, CakeBehat uses $test. Therefore, the definition is needed without fail. My recommendation is that the data base setting is switched by the environment like “Easy peasy database config” of Bakery.
http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/joelmoss/2006/11/16/easy-peasy-database-config

In sample application (sample) of the inclusion, it switch based on the accessed server name.
When the accessed host name is test.localhost, the data base for test is used.
When it is not so, the data base for development is used.
It will become possible to use test.localhost if it set “127.0.0.1 localhost and test.localhost” into the hosts file. It is easy.

How to insert test data

CakeBehat has two methods that can be used with the step file.

• truncateModel() : Method for deletion of test data.
• getModel() Method of getting model to register test data.

$steps->Given('/^there is a post:$/', function($world, $table) {
  $hash = $table->getHash();
  $world->truncateModel('Post');
  $post = $world->getModel('Post');
  foreach ($hash as $row) {
	$post->create(array('Post'=>array('title'=>$row['Title'], 'body'=>$row['Body'])));
	$post->save();
  }
});

Let’s execute it.

Move to the directory including lib, app, and plugins, and next, execute the following commands.
lib/Cake/Console/cake CakeBehat.bdd

You can use any of behat options.
Please check
lib/Cake/Console/cake CakeBehat.bdd --help

The command operates only by the directory that includes app, lib, plugins and vendors, etc.
Please note it.

Sample code

https://github.com/sizuhiko/CakeBehatExampleApp

It include English and Japanese features.