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testingphantomjscodeception

Slow running acceptance test with php + codeception + phantomjs

I am moving to codeception 2.0.3 for doing some tests in various web platforms I am developing. I started doing some acceptance testing. Mainly check for pages ok and doing some form completions (sign in, sign up, nothing fancy).

I have been monitoring tests with firefox browser and we are moving now tests to a dedicated server so I switched to phantomjs as my testing browser.

Configuration in acceptance.suite.yml

WebDriver:
  url: 'localUrl'
  browser: phantomjs 
  window_size: 'maximize'
  capabilities:
      phantomjs.cli.args: ['--ignore-ssl-errors=true']

The thing is that with this headless configuration, tests are running very slowly. I mean, the test I wrote is checking that four links are OK (no error or exception message) without any fancy assertions (something which I can check in less than 20 secs) and it is taking more than a minute a half.

Am I missing something in the configuration of the testing stack? I read that phantomjs testing in this way is supossed to be fast and reliable something that can be integrated while developing but I don't seem to get it working right. I have been doing TDD in Smalltalk and maybe I am a little biased with the way that things work in that environment so maybe my expectations are too high but I had hopes that this could be a little more responsive and easy going.

I am using codeception 2.0.3 with phantomjs 1.9.7 on a linux box with php 5.5.

Any suggestion is welcomed. Thanks!!!

Solution

  • I had very slow running tests and started using strict locators. That sped up things a lot.

    Instead of writing:

    $I->fillField('username, 'john');

    which will try and fail many locator types before actually working, specify the locator you are using and write:

    $I->fillField(['id' => 'username'], 'john');

    or

    $I->fillField(['class' => 'username'], 'john');

    or

    $I->fillField(['css' => 'input .username'], 'john');

    Read here: http://codeception.com/docs/04-AcceptanceTests#Click