Use Behat BDD tests with Drupal 7

Behat is a framework that allows us to write BDD tests, aka given-when-then tests. The language of test specification is quite simple and easy to read and is more business friendly, to know more about BDD you can go here https://inviqa.com/blog/bdd-guide

To use BDD with our drupal 7 site we need to go in the code base, create a folder under sites folder called behat. Installing Behat is done best using composer, so we need to create a composer.json file with the following content

{

  "require": {

    "drupal/drupal-extension": "~3.0"

},

  "config": {

    "bin-dir": "bin/"

  }

}

and save as composer.json 

Instructions are from https://behat-drupal-extension.readthedocs.io/en/3.1/localinstall.html adding starting steps or steps to make things clear.

Assume composer is installed system wide (you can find better guides to install composer by searching on google).

composer install

This will install all required dependencies (exactly why composer is such a good idea).

Your console will fill up with a lot of information like this:

Once everything is installed, we are ready to start writing tests - but we need to tell behat where to store our context and features first, so wait ... what are context and features? more about that in the excellent BDD guide i linked above. 

Lets just say context is where you have your definitions, transformations and hooks, and features where you define your acceptance criteria or your tests in the given-when-then format.

The first step we need to do is initialise behat, to do that we say

./bin/behat --init

This creates the features and context as discussed above and shows you the following message.

If we have installed behat correctly we should be able to see a lot of context already defined for use in our Drupal projects thanks to Drupal Behat extensions. To see the context and maybe use it for reference later do this

./bin/behat -dl

This should list all the context as below:

There are quite a few context defined, in fact they are enough to get us started and take us much further than that. For eg. we will not write a single custom context but try to reuse existing context and write our features to add content and validate.

Remember this if your BDD tests are not working as expected, this could be more because you have modules that have hooks that modify default drupal behaviour and you may have to write your own context by extending the DrupalContext.