Codeception VS http-server

Personal experience: - don’t use Behat unless you really needed a “story telling”, it has a intermediate layer Gherkin that you’ll need to code. You can write “Given/When/Then” steps but you’ll also need to write “php code” that will interpret this step. - using real browser be prepared for instability - any interaction with JavaScript can broken/delay execution - be prepared that this tests are call functional they are the most expensive test, so start small unit then integration and only then functional. - use https://github.com/symfony/panther or https://codeception.com/ you’ll have phpunit alike interface to run them. - you’ll need to reset state of your database each time to provide “isolation” and stability

Codeception: https://codeception.com/

There are enough blog posts about Jest or Cypress already, so let me introduce Codecept. It comes in two flavors. There is Codeception for PHP, and there is CodeceptJS for JavaScript which we will be using here.

There are many tools you can use for this purpose, but one I particularly like is CodeCeption. What I like most about it is that it's a unified tool that can be used to perform several types of tests, acceptance being one of them.

And within the Symfony ecosystem Codeception, which “collects and shares best practices and solutions for testing PHP web applications. With a flexible set of included modules tests are easy to write, easy to use, and easy to maintain.”

Other tools worth mentioning include Codeception and behat. Both use phpUnit underneath, but have different approaches to writing tests.

Codeception

You probably need a few hundred lines of code and some external modules to be able to build what https://www.npmjs.com/package/http-server has. ``` Available Options: Command Description Defaults -p or --port Port to use. Use -p 0 to look for an open port, starting at 8080. It will also read from process.env.PORT. 8080 -a Address to use 0.0.0.0 -d Show directory listings true -i Display autoIndex true -g or --gzip When enabled it will serve ./public/some-file.js.gz in place of ./public/some-file.js when a gzipped version of the file exists and the request accepts gzip encoding. If brotli is also enabled, it will try to serve brotli first. false -b or --brotli When enabled it will serve ./public/some-file.js.br in place of ./public/some-file.js when a brotli compressed version of the file exists and the request accepts br encoding. If gzip is also enabled, it will try to serve brotli first. false -e or --ext Default file extension if none supplied html -s or --silent Suppress log messages from output --cors Enable CORS via the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header -o [path] Open browser window after starting the server. Optionally provide a URL path to open. e.g.: -o /other/dir/ -c Set cache time (in seconds) for cache-control max-age header, e.g. -c10 for 10 seconds. To disable caching, use -c-1. 3600 -U or --utc Use UTC time format in log messages. --log-ip Enable logging of the client's IP address false -P or --proxy Proxies all requests which can't be resolved locally to the given url. e.g.: -P http://someurl.com --proxy-options Pass proxy options using nested dotted objects. e.g.: --proxy-options.secure false --username Username for basic authentication --password Password for basic authentication -S, --tls or --ssl Enable secure request serving with TLS/SSL (HTTPS) false -C or --cert Path to ssl cert file cert.pem -K or --key Path to ssl key file key.pem -r or --robots Automatically provide a /robots.txt (The content of which defaults to User-agent: *\nDisallow: /) false --no-dotfiles Do not show dotfiles --mimetypes Path to a .types file for custom mimetype definition -h or --help Print this list and exit. -v or --version Print the version and exit. Magic Files index.html will be served as the default file to any directory requests. 404.html will be served if a file is not found. This can be used for Single-Page App (SPA) hosting to serve the entry page. Catch-all redirect To implement a catch-all redirect, use the index page itself as the proxy with:

Let’s go ahead and setup our http-server, for this we will be using http-server npm package to help us with this, this is useful for static sites where we do not want to setup a node server manually.

You may need to set it up locally to be served as a local site, using something like this https://www.npmjs.com/package/http-server

Once it's scraped a simple http server command could "host" it on your local machine to play: https://www.npmjs.com/package/http-server

If you don't have a localhost preview server already, you can add one using the http-server package and adding a "serve" target in package.json (see example source code below).

You will see your normal build file in dist folder and a new static folder that contains your SSG files. You can then run the site by switching to the static directory and using a local server like http-server to run the compliled code.

And for the record "server" doesn't necessarily mean you need a separate computer. You can simply use a script like http-server to setup a localhost server from a folder on your computer in one command and that'd solve this problem.

If you want the finished product, I think you should either install nginx or some other “real” httpd. If having a small node package is desirable, I’d check out the http-server package.

To see our first project we need http-server