I recently joined a company that uses codeigniter. I have been using nodejs and rails a ton so I feel like I am missing BDD like tools (rspec/jasmine/mocha). Does PHP and/or CodeIgniter have any sort of CLI based testing suite. If so, how should I structure my app? Any good conventions that can be followed?
There's a project called CIUnit that integrates phpunit to codeigniter and provides some helpful functions, and make it a generally pleasant experience. Unfortunately the official branch is stopped at CI version 1.7.2, but there's a fork that I've been using for 2.1.2.
This gives you the usual xUnit style test suites, code coverage report generators, selenium integration, mock and stub objects and such.
Two most popular PHP BDD frameworks should work just fine with any PHP project:
Behat (StoryBDD)
PHPSpec (SpecBDD)
Today's best solution would be PHPUnit and Selenium. I wrote articles covering the usage here:
On PHPUnit: http://taiar.github.io/php/2013/11/08/testing-codeigniter-applications-with-phpunit/
On PHPUnit with Selenium: http://taiar.github.io/php/2014/04/21/acceptance-tests-on-codeigniter-with-phpunit-and-selenium/
Related
During an interview, project manager asked me the following question:
I see in your resume that you are using PHPUnit 4 for tests? Why don't
you use the built-in testing of Symfony?
I answered:
What I know is that Symfony app testing is done via PHPUnit, which is
recommended from the docs of 2.3 and 2.7. I don't know if Symfony3
comes with a testing component!
Was my answer correct? Thanks for the explanations.
Yes, you are correct. Symfony has a WebTestCase (extending the KernelTestCase where you can find that it extends PhpUnit) for functional testing. Additionally Symfony provides a PhpUnitBridge that provides helpful stuff for writing PHPUnit-Tests for a Symfony app, e.g. to make tests fail that use deprecated components. Both rely on PHPUnit and provide additional capabalities on top of "vanilla" phpunit.
There are alternative testing tools, such as phpspec for writing unit tests and Behat for higher level tests (functional and acceptance testing), but both are not used inside Symfony and therefore don't really seem to be what was being asked about.
Additional information to your answer:
In my experience, WebTestCase also bootstrap kernel as static method in all test. Due to that, is not so good to Unit testing by that tool, as this test should be fast. They design this with functional testing controllers and actions but to not need start HTTP server.
Then for:
unit testing, build-in in is not good option
functional testing, it was original intention, but i think, Behat is better solution
system testing - not so good.
Summary, that is why i don't use this tool.
I would like to implement some basic acceptance tests for my company's legacy PHP app. Selenium WebDriver looks like the best fit, but I need advice on what testing framework to use.
Option 1
Our unit tests are written in Peridot PHP, and I know WebDriver can be run from PHP via php-webdriver. So, it looks like I should be able to write a suite of Peridot tests that use the php-webdriver API to interact with the site. It's been done for PHPUnit, and at a glance I don't see why Peridot can't do the same (gulp).
Option 2
Alternatively, I also know the Codeception framework integrates well with WebDriver. The nice thing about this is that Codeception takes care of setting up the WebDriver server and loading a test database. It also allows for a very nice, readable set of English-language tests, although it would mean maintaining two separate testing frameworks.
Considerations
How completely does Codeception cover the WebDriver set of commands? (i.e. can I do anything I might try in the Selenium IDE through Codeception?)
Does Codeception allow me to use the PageObject design pattern?
What kind of learning curve would I be facing without Codeception in terms of setting up my WebDriver server and test database? Does Codeception even make it that much easier?
There are Firefox plugins to convert 'Selenese' (html) test cases into PHPUnit or Codeception format. The PHPUnit test cases would need to be adapted to Peridot, but the Codeception converter is still in alpha and doesn't convert everything. I would rather not use these a great deal, but they would definitely help with the learning curve. How reliable are either one of these?
An official WebDriver plugin is definitely on the way for Peridot, but in the meantime, it's pretty easy to mix in WebDriver support using scopes.
We actually use WebDriver to demonstrate scopes here:
https://github.com/peridot-php/peridot-scope-example
I'm working on a project that is stuck in php4 and I'm intending to run some UnitTests for some new areas that I'm working on it.
What is the best framework to do UnitTest on PHP4?
Thanks in advance
You can try
1)Simpletest
It is a PHP unit test and web test framework.It has support for SSL, forms, frames, proxies and basic authentication. The idea is that common but fiddly PHP tasks, such as logging into a site, can be tested easily.
2)PHPUnit Automated Unit Testing Framework
It provides a simple framework for creating a test suite to automate testing of functions and classes. PHPUnit stands alone as a good tool for testing classes or a set of functions and will ease your development cycle and help you to avoid endless debug sessions.
I've got an application developed in kohana 3.2. I want to write some functional tests that will affect database content. I would like to load the database from a dump file each time I run all functional test suite (so that I'm sure I can write and remove from the database as much as I want).
How can I do that in Kohana? Does it support functional testing anyhow?
Kohana supports unit testing with the unit test module and php unit installed. It sounds like you may be possibly want to do unit testing with mock objects. You could also set up your database using your models or a dump file too. Full functional testing is possible as well. A good place to start is enable the testing module and then start here...
https://github.com/kohana/unittest/tree/3.2/master/guide
And phpunit here...
https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/
I use Codeception for all of my acceptance test, functional tests, and unit tests which is powered by PHPUnit. It is the best testing framework that I have found for PHP. You can pre-load sql dumps prior to functional tests and query directly against the database. It also integrates easily with Selenium for testing browsers.
I released a vagrant development environment with an empty checkout of Kohana 3.3.1 if you want to try it out Codeception. The tests are incredibly easy to write.
Intro to Vagrant with Kohana and Zen Kommerce
Codeception
Which unit testing framework do you use for Symfony?
Lime or PHPUnit? What are the pros and cons of using them?
In my opinion, here are a few things that come to my mind :
PHPUnit is more integrated with other tools, like, for instance,
Selenium (PHPUnit can use it to open true real browsers to test your site)
phpUnderControl for continuous-integration
PHPUnit works well with Xdebug, to generate code-coverage reports
PHPUnit is more widely used ; which probably means more support
But note I don't work with symfony, nor lime...
Still, I've never heards anyone speak about it, except for those working with symfony -- that not a good thing, for the day you'll have to work with another framework (yes, this happens ^^ )
One thing that's not in PHPUnit :
"false" browser (being able to do HTTP Requests to the application, without using Selenium to open a real browser)
But some frameworks (Zend Framework does, with it's Zend_Test component) integrate with PHPUnit (or use it), while allowing injection of data into the MVC and fetching of the response, without having to issue any HTTP Request.
I don't know if symfony allows that, but that's a nice thing with ZF/PHPUnit ^^
(Yes, not a symfony-specific answer ; but of the things I said must still be valid with that framework)
Lime is a much more simple testing framework, which can be a good or a bad thing depending on how you want to use it.
The symfony library itself uses its own testing framework, Lime, to test its code base. From the symfony book:
It is based on the Test::More Perl
library, and is TAP compliant, which
means that the result of tests is
displayed as specified in the Test
Anything Protocol, designed for better
readability of test output.
I cannot vouch for the statement that the lime framework is "more lightweight" than other PHP testing frameworks as the symfony docs claim, but I do really like that it's built right into your symfony project and works well with the symfony command line tools without any additional configuration. One thing that is especially cool is that the lime tests within symfony are set to run within your "test" environment which has it's own database, symfony cache (which gets cleared out during each test session), and environment variables. This comes in handy when you want to do functional testing (checking server response and your html output in your modules/actions, versus basic unit testing). I also like that lime is super easy to pick up and understand since it's so simple. You also have the ability to put your tests into YAML configuration file rather than write the tests by hand.
Pascal is entirely right that PHPUnit is much more widely used and you'd be able to use it in non-symfony projects. There is even a plugin for it, PHPUnit symfony plugin. My best advice would be to use lime if you just wanted to jump right into writing simple tests while you develop your symfony app. But, if you have the time and hope to use these testing skills outside of the symfony world, or bring in pre-existing PHPUnit tests into your symfony code, it'd be worth your time to check out the plugin and give it a spin.