Acceptance testing can be performed by a non-technical person. That person can be your tester, manager or even client. If you are developing a web-application (and probably you are) the tester needs nothing more than a web browser to check that your site works correctly. You can reproduce a AcceptanceTester's actions in scenarios and run them automatically after each site change. Codeception keeps tests clean and simple, as if they were recorded from the words of AcceptanceTester.

It makes no difference what CMS or Framework is used on the site. You can even test sites created on different platforms, like Java, .NET, etc. It's always a good idea to add tests to your web site. At least you will be sure that site features work after the last changes were made.

Probably the first test you would want to run would be signing in. In order to write such a test, we still require basic knowledge of PHP and HTML.

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

This scenario can probably be read by non-technical people. Codeception can even 'naturalize' this scenario, converting it into plain English:

{% highlight bash %}

I WANT TO SIGN IN I am on page '/login' I fill field 'username', 'davert' I fill field 'password', 'qwerty' I click 'LOGIN' I see 'Welcome, Davert!'

{% endhighlight %}

Such transformations can be done by command:

{% highlight bash %}

$ php codecept.phar generate:scenarios

{% endhighlight %}

Generated scenarios will be stored in your _output directory in text files.

This scenario can be performed either by a simple PHP Browser or by a browser with Selenium WebDriver. We will start writing our first acceptance tests with a PhpBrowser.

This is the fastest way to run acceptance tests, since it doesn't require running an actual browser. We use a PHP web scraper, which acts like a browser: it sends a request, then receives and parses the response. Codeception uses Guzzle and Symfony BrowserKit to interact with HTML web pages. Please note that you can't test actual visibility of elements, or javascript interactions. Good thing about PhpBrowser is that it can be run in any environment with just PHP and cURL required.

Common PhpBrowser drawbacks:

• you can click only on links with valid urls or form submit buttons
• you can't fill fields that are not inside a form
• you can't work with JavaScript interactions: modal windows, datepickers, etc.

Before we start we need a local copy of the site running on your host. We need to specify the url parameter in the acceptance suite config (tests/acceptance.suite.yml).

{% highlight yaml %}

class_name: AcceptanceTester modules: enabled: - PhpBrowser: url: {{your site url}} - \Helper\Acceptance

{% endhighlight %}

We should start by creating a 'Cept' file in the tests/acceptance directory. Let's call it SigninCept.php. We will write the first lines into it.

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

The wantTo section describes your scenario in brief. There are additional comment methods that are useful to make a Codeception scenario a BDD Story. If you have ever written a BDD scenario in Gherkin, you can write a classic feature story:

{% highlight bash %}

As an Account Holder I want to withdraw cash from an ATM So that I can get money when the bank is closed

{% endhighlight %}

in Codeception style:

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

After we have described the story background, let's start writing a scenario.

The $I object is used to write all interactions. The methods of the $I object are taken from the PhpBrowser module. We will briefly describe it here:

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

We assume that all am actions should describe the starting environment. The amOnPage action sets the starting point of a test to the /login page.

With the PhpBrowser you can click the links and fill the forms. That will probably be the majority of your actions.

Emulates a click on valid anchors. The page from the "href" parameter will be opened. As a parameter you can specify the link name or a valid CSS or XPath selector.

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

Codeception tries to locate element either by its text, name, CSS or XPath. You can specify locator type manually by passing array as a parameter. We call this a strict locator. Available strict locator types are:

• id
• name
• css
• xpath
• link
• class

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

Before clicking the link you can perform a check if the link really exists on a page. This can be done by the seeLink action.

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

Clicking the links is not what takes the most time during testing a web site. If your site consists only of links you can skip test automation. The most routine waste of time goes into the testing of forms. Codeception provides several ways of doing that.

Let's submit this sample form inside the Codeception test.

{% highlight html %}

{% endhighlight %}

From a user's perspective, a form consists of fields which should be filled, and then an Update button clicked.

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

To match fields by their labels, you should write a for attribute in the label tag.

From the developer's perspective, submitting a form is just sending a valid post request to the server. Sometimes it's easier to fill all of the fields at once and send the form without clicking a 'Submit' button. A similar scenario can be rewritten with only one command.

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

The submitForm is not emulating a user's actions, but it's quite useful in situations when the form is not formatted properly, for example to discover that labels aren't set or that fields have unclean names or badly written ids, or the form is sent by a javascript call.

By default, submitForm doesn't send values for buttons. The last parameter allows specifying what button values should be sent, or button values can be implicitly specified in the second parameter.

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

In the PHP browser you can test the page contents. In most cases you just need to check that the required text or element is on the page.

The most useful command for this is see.

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

You can check that specific element exists (or not) on a page

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

We also have other useful commands to perform checks. Please note that they all start with the see prefix.

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

Sometimes you don't want the test to be stopped when an assertion fails. Maybe you have a long-running test and you want it to run to the end. In this case you can use conditional assertions. Each see method has a corresponding canSee method, and dontSee has a cantSee method.

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

Each failed assertion will be shown in test results. Still, a failed assertion won't stop the test.

These commands retrieve data that can be used in test. Imagine, your site generates a password for every user and you want to check the user can log into the site using this password.

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

Grabbers allow you to get a single value from the current page with commands.

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

Within a long scenario you should describe what actions you are going to perform and what results to achieve. Commands like amGoingTo, expect, expectTo help you in making tests more descriptive.

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

Actions for cookies:

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

Actions for checking page title:

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

Actions for url:

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

A nice feature of Codeception is that most scenarios can be easily ported between the testing backends. Your PhpBrowser tests we wrote previously can be executed inside a real browser (or PhantomJS) with Selenium WebDriver.

The only thing we need to change is to reconfigure and rebuild the AcceptanceTester class, to use WebDriver instead of PhpBrowser.

Modify your acceptance.suite.yml file:

{% highlight yaml %}

class_name: AcceptanceTester modules: enabled: - WebDriver: url: {{your site url}} browser: firefox
- \Helper\Acceptance

{% endhighlight %}

In order to run Selenium tests you need to download Selenium Server and get it running (Alternatively you may use PhantomJS headless browser in ghostdriver mode).

If you run acceptance tests with Selenium, Firefox will be started and all actions will be performed step by step using browser engine.

In this case seeElement won't just check that the element exists on a page, but it will also check that element is actually visible to user.

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

While testing web application, you may need to wait for JavaScript events to occur. Due to its asynchronous nature, complex JavaScript interactions are hard to test. That's why you may need to use wait actions, which can be used to specify what event you expect to occur on a page, before proceeding the test.

For example:

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

In this case we are waiting for agree button to appear and then clicking it. If it didn't appear for 30 seconds, test will fail. There are other wait methods you may use.

See Codeception's WebDriver module documentation for the full reference.

It's often needed to persist user session between tests. If you need to authorize user for each test you can do so by filling Login form in the beginning of each test. Running those steps take time, and in case of Selenium tests (which are slow by themselves) can be this time can be significant. Codeception allows you to share cookies between tests, so once logged in user could stay authorized for other tests.

In demonstration purposes let's write a support function test_login and use it in test:

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

Instead of writing test_login function shown above it is recommended to implement it inside AcceptanceTester class.

Codeception allows you to execute actions in concurrent sessions. The most obvious case for it is testing realtime messaging between users on site. In order to do it you will need to launch two browser windows at the same time for the same test. Codeception has very smart concept for doing this. It is called Friends.

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

In this case we did some actions in second window with does command on a friend object.

While testing, your actions may change the data on the site. Tests will fail if trying to create or update the same data twice. To avoid this problem, your database should be repopulated for each test. Codeception provides a Db module for that purpose. It will load a database dump after each passed test. To make repopulation work, create an sql dump of your database and put it into the _/tests/data directory. Set the database connection and path to the dump in the global Codeception config.

{% highlight yaml %}

modules: config: Db: dsn: '[set pdo dsn here]' user: '[set user]' password: '[set password]' dump: tests/_data/dump.sql

{% endhighlight %}

After we configured Db module we should have it enabled in acceptance.suite.yml config.

Codeception modules can print valuable information while running. Just execute tests with the --debug option to see running details. For any custom output use codecept_debug function.

{% highlight php %}

{% endhighlight %}

On each fail, the snapshot of the last shown page will be stored in the _tests/output directory. PhpBrowser will store HTML code and WebDriver will save the screenshot of a page.

Sometimes you may want to inspect a web page opened by a running test. For such cases you may use pauseExecution method of WebDriver module.

You can also record your tests step by step and review execution flow as slideshow with the help of Recorder extension.

Writing acceptance tests with Codeception and PhpBrowser is a good start. You can easily test your Joomla, Drupal, WordPress sites, as well as those made with frameworks. Writing acceptance tests is like describing a tester's actions in PHP. They are quite readable and very easy to write. Don't forget to repopulate the database on each test run.

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