Behat & XDebug: Debugging Steps.

Occasionally when writing complicated steps in Behat it’s useful to debug them (perhaps to find out why your tests are failing!).

The Behat test runner is actually just a PHP script run from the command line. As such by declaring a special variable before running the test runner we can trigger a remote debugging session on your favorite IDE.

From the XDebug manual:

When running the script from the command line you need to set an environment variable, like:
export XDEBUG_CONFIG=”idekey=session_name”
php myscript.php
You can also configure the xdebug.remote_host, xdebug.remote_port, xdebug.remote_mode and xdebug.remote_handler in this same environment variable. All those configurable settings can also be set with normal php.ini settings.

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To trigger a session from the test runner we should use a command similar to the following:

XDEBUG_CONFIG="idekey=session_name" behat path/to/tests

For this to work a debugging session must be started in your IDE (eg – In Netbeans: Project Menu > debug).

Typing this over and over again can get irritating so the next logical step is to set up an alias.

Edit your .bash_profile or .bashrc file using your terminal like so:

> nano ~/.bash_profile

// Then add the following line:

alias behatxc='XDEBUG_CONFIG="idekey=session_name" behat'

Now when you want to run the steps and trigger a debugging session use the command: ‘bashxc’. When you want to run the test runner normally use the regular Behat command.

Tags: behat, PHP, Testing, xdebug