Testing environment setup

Note: This section is under development.

Yii2 has officially maintained integration with Codeception testing framework that allows you to create the following test types:

  • Unit testing - verifies that a single unit of code is working as expected;
  • Functional testing - verifies scenarios from a user’s perspective via browser emulation;
  • Acceptance testing - verifies scenarios from a user’s perspective in a browser.

Yii provides ready to use test sets for all three test types in both yii2-basic and yii2-advanced project templates.

In order to run tests you need to install Codeception. You can install it either locally - for particular project only, or globally - for your development machine.

For the local installation use following commands:

  1. composer require "codeception/codeception=2.0.*"
  2. composer require "codeception/specify=*"
  3. composer require "codeception/verify=*"

For the global installation you will need to use global directive:

  1. composer global require "codeception/codeception=2.0.*"
  2. composer global require "codeception/specify=*"
  3. composer global require "codeception/verify=*"

If you’ve never used Composer for global packages before, run composer global status. It should output:

  1. Changed current directory to <directory>

Then add <directory>/vendor/bin to you PATH environment variable. Now we’re able to use codecept from command line globally.

Note: global installation allows you use Codeception for all projects you are working on your development machine and allows running codecept shell command globally without specifying path. However, such approach may be inappropriate, for example, if 2 different projects require different versions of Codeception installed. For the simplicity all shell commands related to the tests running around this guide are written assuming Codeception has been installed globally.