Codeception VS ParaTest

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/

I would say to check out Codeception. Codeceptions has modules for Symfony and database generally. Long and short of it is that if you want you can run api tests that go into the controllers and rollback the database afterwards.

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.

This is a quote from this year's new Testify T-Shirt, my physical takeway from this event. While I don't agree that we should automate everything we can, I still chose this design as it shows Codeception code.

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.”

I haven’t tried it with the MySQL-connection, I use the in-memory version, but paratest (https://github.com/paratestphp/paratest) has never failed me. Not an answer to your question, but an answer to your problem I guess.

Pretty sure it has always supported multiple cores, judging by the documentation of the underlying library :

paratest

Paratest: Parallel testing for PHPUnit

Once you have lots of tests, use https://github.com/paratestphp/paratest with this I can run 3100 tests in about 3 seconds (on a 4core box using 16 threads).