Codeception – BDD-style testing framework for PHP

Testing is really important. Good test code is needed for ANY application development.

Fortunately, PHP developers have a very good testing framework named PHPUnit.

Codeception is yet another great testing framework for PHP, in *BDD-style*. It provides as many functionality as PHPUnit, then come with BDD-style API which creates a lot of fun to write Test code!

It’s easy to install Codeception by Composer. For other ways, please follow this documentation. This blog assume you follow installation by Composer.

After installation, it’s required to run to generate configuration directories and files:

$ vendor/bin/codecept bootstrap

Easy!

Let’s look a bit into just-generated tests/ folder. Besides some configuration files, we can see 3 main directories:

Those are where we’ll put test code. Let’s write one.

First acceptance test

Just execute:

$ vendor/bin/codecept generate:cept acceptance HelloWorld

The above command will generate new file named HelloWorldCept.php into /acceptance directory. Let’s write a test code, like writing an essay, to make sure ‘Septech’ is there in frontpage

Wow, ok, failure with red color is expected.

Next, we write quick frontpage, using Silex framework

$ composer require silex/silex:~1.2

If you’re not familiar with Silex, take a look at my previous blog on Composer and Silex. The application code of Silex can be found here.

Okay. Now we have application code, let’s run test code again:

Great!

This blog is just a introduction to Codeception. We can do a lot with Codeception, include unit test, functional test, acceptance test, in BDD-style. In that way, we can introduce more stakeholders to (White Box) testing phase, for example Production Owner, QA.., which is so valuable in some context!

Demo code can be found here