Steward: easy and robust testing with Selenium WebDriver + PHPUnit

Steward is set of libraries made to simplify writing and running robust functional system tests in PHPUnit using Selenium WebDriver.

What's great about Steward?

• It allows you to start writing complex test cases in a minute.
• It makes a lot of work for you: download and install Selenium server with one command; set-up browser of your choice; automatically take a screenshot on failed assertion; produce test results in JUnit format (easily processable e.g. by Jenkins and other tools) and more.
• Your tests are run in a parallel, so the bottleneck is just the amount of Selenium nodes you start simultaneously.
• Simple syntax sugar layer on top of default WebDriver commands can help you shorten your tests and make them more readable.
• If you already use PHP, you don't have to learn a new language to write functional tests. Moreover, if you are familiar with unit tests and PHPUnit, you know it all.
• Allows you to plan tests dependencies - need to wait 2 minutes until some event gets through your message queue so you could test the result? No problem! The order of tests is even optimized to minimize the total execution time.
• Status of the tests could be clearly watched during tests execution, so you will easily know how many tests were already finished and what was their result.
• You can extend it easily by e.g. registering custom events to EventDispatcher. Thus you can, for example, add custom configuration options or change parameters passed to child PHPUnit processes.
• Cloud services like Sauce Labs, BrowserStack or TestingBot are fully integrated, giving you a possibility to run tests with even less setup and without own infrastructure.
• It is field tested - we use it daily in our company to maintain quality of our various products thanks to hundreds of test-cases. The library itself is also extensively covered with unit tests.
• Steward is built on solid foundations: WebDriver is W3C draft standard for browser automation, php-webdriver is the most used and developed Selenium language binding for PHP, PHPUnit is well known and widely used testing framework and Symfony Console is industry standard for PHP CLI applications.

Example usage

To see how to use and extend Steward, have a look at our example project.

Changelog

For latest changes see CHANGELOG.md file. We follow Semantic Versioning.

Getting started

1. Install Steward

For most cases we recommend having functional tests in the same repository as your application but in a separate folder. So let's suggest we put them in selenium-tests/ directory.

In this directory then simply install Steward:

$ composer require lmc/steward

Note you will need to have Composer installed to do this.

2. Download Selenium server and browser driver

You can download and run Selenium standalone server and the browser locally right on your computer. Another possibility is to start Selenium server + browser inside Docker container. To run Selenium locally:

Get Selenium standalone server

You need to download Selenium server so it can execute commands in the specified browser. In the root directory of your tests (e.g. selenium-tests/) simply run:

$ ./vendor/bin/steward install

This will check for the latest released version of Selenium standalone server and download it for you (the jar file will be placed into ./vendor/bin directory).

You may want to run this command as part of your CI server build - then simply use the --no-interaction option to download the Selenium without any interaction and print absolute path to the jar file as the sole output.

Download browser driver

If it is not already installed on your system, you will need to download Selenium driver for the browser you want to use for the tests. See dedicated page Selenium server & browser drivers in our wiki for more information.

3. Write the first test

To provide you the Steward functionality, your tests have to extend the Lmc\Steward\Test\AbstractTestCase class.

You must also configure PSR-4 autoloading so that your tests could be found by Steward. For the following example it is as easy as adding following to your composer.json:

    "autoload": {
        "psr-4": {
            "My\\": "tests/"
        }
    }

Don't forget to create the selenium-tests/tests/ directory and to run composer dump-autoload afterward.

Now the test itself (place it to selenium-tests/tests/ directory):

<?php
// selenium-tests/tests/TitlePageTest.php

namespace My; // Note the "My" namespace maps to the "tests" folder, as defined in the autoload part of `composer.json`.

use Facebook\WebDriver\WebDriverBy;
use Lmc\Steward\Test\AbstractTestCase;

class TitlePageTest extends AbstractTestCase
{
    public function testShouldContainSearchInput()
    {
        // Load the URL (will wait until page is loaded)
        $this->wd->get('http://www.w3.org/'); // $this->wd holds instance of \RemoteWebDriver

        // Do some assertion
        $this->assertContains('W3C', $this->wd->getTitle());

        // You can use $this->log(), $this->warn() or $this->debug() with sprintf-like syntax
        $this->log('Current page "%s" has title "%s"', $this->wd->getCurrentURL(), $this->wd->getTitle());

        // Make sure search input is present
        $searchInput = $this->wd->findElement(WebDriverBy::cssSelector('#search-form input'));
        // Or you can use syntax sugar provided by Steward (this is equivalent of previous line)
        $searchInput = $this->findByCss('#search-form input');

        // Assert title of the search input
        $this->assertEquals('Search', $searchInput->getAttribute('title'));
    }
}

4. Run your tests

Start Selenium server

Now you need to start Selenium server, which will listen and execute commands sent from your tests.

$ java -jar ./vendor/bin/selenium-server-standalone-3.4.0.jar # the version may differ

This will start single Selenium server instance (listening on port 4444) in "no-grid" mode (meaning the server receives and also executes the commands itself). You may want to run the Selenium server in a grid mode (when the hub is receiving the commands and multiple nodes are executing them) - please consult help and especially the -role option of the Selenium server.

Run Steward!

Having your Selenium server listening, let's launch your test! Use the run command:

./vendor/bin/steward run staging firefox

In few moments you should see Firefox window appearing, then the http://www.w3.org/ site (as defined in the example tests) should be loaded and the window will be instantly closed. See the output of the command to check the test result.

The run command has two required arguments - the name of environment and browser:

• The environment argument has no effect by default, but it is accessible in your tests making it easy to e.g. change the base URL of your tested site - for example, your local server or staging environment
• The browser name could be any name of browser supported by Selenium. Most common are "firefox", "chrome", "phantomjs", "safari" and "internet explorer". See our wiki for more info related to installing browser drivers.

There is also a bunch of useful options of run command:

• --group - run just specific group(s) of tests
• --exclude-group - exclude some group(s) of tests (can be even combined with --group)
• --server-url - set different url of selenium server than the default (http://localhost:4444)
• --xdebug - start Xdebug debugger on your tests, so you can debug tests from your IDE (learn more about tests debugging in our Wiki)
• --capability - directly pass any extra capability to the Selenium WebDriver server (see wiki for more information and examples)
• --help - see all other options and default values
• adjust output levels: by default, only test results summary is printed to the output; the verbosity could be changed like this:
  • -v - to instantly output name of failed test(s)
  • -vv - print also progress information during run (which tests were started/finished etc); if any test fails, its output will by printed to the console
  • -vvv - output everything, including all output from the tests

5. See the results and screenshots

The log is printed to the console where you run the run command. But this could be a bit confusing, especially if you run multiple tests in parallel.

So for each testcase there is a separate file in JUnit XML format, placed in logs/ directory. Also, screenshots and HTML snapshots are saved into this directory (they are automatically generated on failed assertion or if some WebDriver command fails).

To see the current status of tests during (or after) tests execution, open file logs/results.xml in your browser:

Similar output but in command line interface could be obtained using steward results command - see below. You can also add -vvv to see results of each individual test.

6. See test execution timeline

Steward provides a visual representation of test execution timeline. When used with Selenium server grid you can see which Selenium node executed which testcase, identify possible bottlenecks and so on.

To generate the timeline, simply run after your test build is finished the command generate-timeline:

./vendor/bin/steward generate-timeline

File timeline.html will be then generated into logs/ directory.

License

Steward is open source software licensed under the MIT license.