Introducing Drupal Test TraitsMass.
gov dev team releases open source projectMoshe WeitzmanBlockedUnblockFollowFollowingFeb 6The Mass.
gov development team is proud to release a new open source project, Drupal Test Traits (DTT).
DTT enables you to run PHPUnit tests against your Drupal web site, without wiping your database after each test class.
That is, you test with your usual content-filled database, not an empty one.
We hope lots of Drupal sites will use DTT and contribute back their improvements.
Thanks to PreviousNext and Phase2 for being early adopters.
Mass.
gov is a large, content-centric site.
Most of our tests click around and assert that content is laid out properly, the corresponding icons are showing, etc.
In order to best verify this, we need the Mass.
gov database; testing on an empty site won’t suffice.
The traditional tool for testing a site using an existing database is Behat.
So we used Behat for over a year and found it getting more and more awkward.
Behat is great for facilitating conversations between business managers and developers.
Those are useful conversations, but many organizations are like ours — we don’t write product specs in Gherkin.
In fact, we don’t do anything in Gherkin beside Behat.
Meanwhile, the test framework inside Drupal core improved a lot in the last couple of years (mea culpa).
Before Drupal Test Traits, this framework was impossible to use without wiping the site’s database after each test.
DTT lets you keep your database and still test using the features of Drupal’s BrowserTestBase and friends.
See DrupalTrait::setUp() for details (the bootstrap is inspired by Drush, a different open source project that I maintain).
Zakim Bridge at Night, North End Boston.
Photo by David Fox.
Using DTT in a TestOur test cases extend ExistingSiteBase, a convenience class from DTT that imports all the test traits.
We will eventually create our own base class and import the traits there.
Notice calls to $this->createNode().
This convenience method wraps Drupal’s method of the same name.
DTT deletes each created node during tearDown().
Note how we call Vocabulary::load().
This is an important point — the full Drupal and Mink APIs are available during a test.
The abstraction of Behat is happily removed.
Writing test classes more resembles writing module code.
More FeaturesDTT also supports testing through a real browser using headless Chrome or Selenium.
So, testing client-side interactions like autocomplete, #states, viewports, and drag/drop is easy.
Like Drupal core, DTT can save HTML snapshots for each URL that it navigates to.
These files are very useful when debugging test failures.
MiscSee the DTT repo for details on how to install and run testsTypically, one does not run tests against a live web site.
Tests can fail and leave sites in a “dirty” state so it’s helpful to occasionally refresh to a pristine database.
If you have questions or comments about DTT, please comment below or submit issues/PRs in our repository.
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