Functional-core-imperative-shell VS Symfony Panther

I usually formulate this as lifting side-effects up in the stack trace. Done well you end up with functional core, imperative shell.

The pattern functional core, imperative shell will help you make bigger chunks of your code-base be unit testable without database or file scaffolding.

[1]: Functional core, imperative shell

Better summary than I could provide: https://github.com/kbilsted/Functional-core-imperative-shell/blob/master/README.md

Use some library with WebDriver API (f.ex. Symfony Panther if you want to stick to PHP, or Playwright) to run tests against your WP backend

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

For headless browser testing with symfony there is symfony panther (https://github.com/symfony/panther)

I did something similar with Symfony Panther combined with ChromeDriver.

For tools, I use PHPUnit, Symfony's PHPUnit helper classes, and Panther (for frontend/headless-browser testing, mostly JS behavior)

If you are comfortable with using composer and third party libraries I would suggest checking out https://github.com/symfony/panther

I like this one recently https://github.com/symfony/panther

Panther

What you're looking for is a package to control a "headless browser". The best one IMO is symfony/panther: https://github.com/symfony/panther