beflash

README

beflash - Parallel Behat feature runner

Runs Behat features files in parallel. Note: this requires your test suite to be compatible with parallel runner. For example in our case, we isolate scenarios within a database transaction and this allows us to run tests in parallel. When scenario ends - transaction is rolled back and the state is fresh again.

The success story

We had our test suite running for 15 minutes, now we run it within 1.5 minute. It tests the same MySQL database with all the constraints and state cleanup, including symfony2 kernel reboot on each scenario.

So in our case:

• we run our tests 10x faster, our CI is happy.
• we have found other application bugs, like doctrine ORM collection handling, database transaction deadlocks..

Under the hood

The runner, based on concurrency level, executes few behat feature files and handles the output stream.

Installation

To install, simply run:

go get github.com/DATA-DOG/beflash

It should be installed in your $GOPATH/bin and since it is probably in your $PATH, run it in your project directory by calling beflash

Use

Default places to look for behat executable and features directory are bin/behat and features/ respectively. Use -bin and -features flags to specify custom parameters.

Concurrency level

By default it uses the available number of CPUs, to modify:

beflash -c 2

Command options

beflash -h

Final words

It is still work in progress - use it at your own discretion!

TODO

• Show failures the same way as default behat runner does
• Create a demo project to demonstrate the behavior

Nice to have

• Take console width into consideration when formatting steps output