behat

I've been going kind of crazy covering a particular Drupal site I'm building in Behat tests—testing every bit of core functionality on the site. In this particular case, a feature I'm testing allows users to upload arbitrary files to an SFTP server, then Drupal shows those filenames in a streamlined UI.

I needed to be able to test the user action of "I'm a user, I upload a file to this directory, then I see the file listed in a certain place on the site."

These files are not managed by Drupal (e.g. they're not file field uploads), but if they were, I'd invest some time in resolving this issue in the drupalextension project: "When I attach the file" and Drupal temporary files.

Since they are just random files dropped on the filesystem, I needed to:

On a recent project, I needed to add some behavioral tests to cover the functionality of the Password Policy module. I seem to be a sucker for pain, because often I choose to test the things it seems there's no documentation on—like testing the functionality of the partially-Javascript-powered password fields on the user account forms.

In this case, I was presented with two challenges:

• I needed to run one scenario where a user edits his/her own password, and must follow the site's configured password policy.
• I needed to run another scenario where an admin creates a new user account, and must follow the site's configured password policy for the created user's password.

So I came up with the following scenarios:

There are some occasions when I want my Drupal Behat tests to perform some action as a user that already exists on the Drupal site. For example, I have a test install profile with some Default Content (users, nodes, taxonomy terms, etc.), and it already has a large set of default test data set up on the site for the benefit of developers who need to work on theming/site building.

Rather than define a ton of extra Behat steps to re-create all this test content and these test users, I just want Behat to log in as an existing user and perform actions with the pre-existing content.

Note that this might not be a good idea depending on the structure or philosophy of your site's testing. As a general principle, state should be avoided—and that includes things like 'having a set of default stuff already existing before a test runs'. However, in the real world there are situations where it's a ton easier to just use the state that exists ?.

The problem

Out of the box, the Drupal API Driver lets you create a user in a Scenario and then use that created user, like so:

One project I'm working on needed a Behat test added to test whether a particular redirection works properly. Basically, I wanted to test for the following:

1. An anonymous user accesses a file at a URL like http://www.example.com/pictures/test.jpg
2. The anonymous user is redirected to the path http://www.example.com/sites/default/files/pictures/test.jpg

Since the site uses Apache, I added the actual redirect to the site's .htaccess file in the docroot, using the following Rewrite configuration:

Testing with curl --head, I could see that the proper headers were set—Location was set to the correct redirected URL, and the response gave a 301. So now I had to add the Behat test.