In this chapter we will explain how you can extend and customize file structure and test execution routines.

In case your project consists of several applications (frontend, admin, api) or you use Symfony2 framework with its bundles, you may be interested in having all tests for all applications (bundles) to be executed in one runner. In this case you will get one report that covers the whole project.

Place codeception.yml file into root folder of your project and specify paths to other codeception.yml configs you want to include.

{% highlight yaml %}

include:

• frontend/src/*Bundle
• admin
• api/rest paths: log: log settings: colors: false

{% endhighlight %}

You should also specify path to log directory, where the reports and logs will be stored.

To avoid naming conflicts between Actor classes and Helper classes, they should be added into namespaces. To create test suites with namespaces you can add --namespace option to bootstrap command.

{% highlight bash %}

$ php codecept.phar bootstrap --namespace frontend

{% endhighlight %}

This will bootstrap a new project with namespace: frontend parameter in codeception.yml file. Helpers will be in frontend\Codeception\Module namespace and Actor classes will be in frontend namespace. Thus, newly generated tests will look like this:

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

Once each of your applications (bundles) has its own namespace and different Helper or Actor classes, you can execute all tests in one runner. Run codeception tests as usual, using meta-config we created earlier:

{% highlight bash %}

$ php codecept.phar run

{% endhighlight %}

This will launch test suites for all 3 applications and merge the reports from all of them. Basically that would be very useful when you run your tests on Continuous Integration server and you want to get one report in JUnit and HTML format. Codecoverage report will be merged too.

If your applications uses same helpers, follow the next section of this chapter.

Codeception has limited capabilities to extend its core features. Extensions are not supposed to override current functionality, but are pretty useful if you are experienced developer and you want to hook into testing flow.

By default, one RunFailed Extension is already enabled in your global codeception.yml. It allows you to rerun failed tests with -g failed option:

{% highlight php %} codecept.phar run -g failed

{% endhighlight %}

Codeception comes with bundled extensions located in ext directory. For instance, you can enable Logger extension to log test execution with Monolog

{% highlight yaml %}

extensions: enabled: - Codeception\Extension\RunFailed # default extension - Codeception\Extension\Logger # enabled extension config: Codeception\Extension\Logger: max_files: 5 # logger configuration

{% endhighlight %}

But what are extensions, anyway? Basically speaking, Extensions are nothing more then event listeners based on Symfony Event Dispatcher component.

Here are the events and event classes. The events are listed in order they happen during execution. Each event has a corresponding class, which is passed to listener, and contains specific objects.

There may be a confusion between test.start/test.before and test.after/test.end. Start/end events are triggered by PHPUnit itself. But before/after events are triggered by Codeception. Thus, when you have classical PHPUnit test (extended from PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase), before/after events won't be triggered for them. On test.before event you can mark test as skipped or incomplete, which is not possible in test.start. You can learn more from Codeception internal event listeners.

The extension class itself is inherited from Codeception\Extension.

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

By implementing event handling methods you can listen to event and even update passed objects. Extensions have some basic methods you can use:

• write - prints to screen
• writeln - prints to screen with line end char at the end
• getModule - allows you to access a module
• hasModule - checks if module is enabled
• getModuleNames - list all enabled modules
• _reconfigure - can be implemented instead of overriding constructor.

Once you've implemented a simple extension class, you can require it in tests/_bootstrap.php, load with Composer's autoloader defined in composer.json, or store class inside tests/_supportdir.

Then you can enable it in codeception.yml:

{% highlight yaml %}

extensions: enabled: [MyCustomExtension]

{% endhighlight %}

In extension you can access currently passed options via options property. You also can access global config via \Codeception\Configuration::config() method. But if you want to have custom options for your extension, you can pass them in codeception.yml file:

{% highlight yaml %}

extensions: enabled: [MyCustomExtension] config: MyCustomExtension: param: value

{% endhighlight %}

Passed configuration is accessible via config property: $this->config['param'].

Check out a very basic extension Notifier.

Group Objects are extensions listening to events of a tests belonging to a specific group. When a test is added to a group:

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

This test will trigger events:

• test.before.admin
• step.before.admin
• step.after.admin
• test.success.admin
• test.fail.admin
• test.after.admin

A group object is built to listen to these events. It is pretty useful when additional setup is required for some of your tests. Let's say you want to load fixtures for tests that belong to admin group:

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

A group class can be created with php codecept.phar generate:group groupname command. Group class will be stored in tests/_support/Group directory.

A group class can be enabled just like you enable extension class. In file codeception.yml:

{% highlight yaml %}

extensions: enabled: [Group\Admin]

{% endhighlight %}

Now Admin group class will listen to all events of tests that belong to the admin group.

Each feature mentioned above may dramatically help when using Codeception to automate testing of large projects, although some features may require advanced knowledge of PHP. There is no "best practice" or "use cases" when we talk about groups, extensions, or other powerful features of Codeception. If you see you have a problem that can be solved using these extensions, then give them a try.

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