Behat test "Then I should see Laravel 5" fails in laravel application

Question

I have a Macbook with OS El Capitan. In my new Laravel application (created by $ composer create-project laravel/laravel my_app), I type:

$ php artisan serve

And in the browser (Safari or Chrome) on localhost:8000 I successfully see black text "Laravel 5" on the webpage.

I have a hometest.feature file in features/ that looks like:

Feature:
  In order to prove that Behat works as intended
  We want to test the home page for a phrase
  Scenario: Root Test
    When I am on the homepage
    Then I should see "Laravel 5"

I have a /features/bootstrap/FeaturesContext.php file which looks like:

<?php

use Behat\Behat\Context\Context;
use Behat\Behat\Context\SnippetAcceptingContext;
use Behat\Gherkin\Node\PyStringNode;
use Behat\Gherkin\Node\TableNode;

/**
 * Defines application features from the specific context.
 */
class FeatureContext extends Behat\MinkExtension\Context\MinkContext implements Context, SnippetAcceptingContext
{
    /**
     * Initializes context.
     *
     * Every scenario gets its own context instance.
     * You can also pass arbitrary arguments to the
     * context constructor through behat.yml.
     */
    public function __construct()
    {
    }
}

I have a behat.yml file that looks like:

default:
    extensions:
        Laracasts\Behat:
            # env_path: .env.behat
        Behat\MinkExtension:
            default_session: laravel
            base_url: http://localhost:8000
            laravel: ~

When I run (localhost running or not running = doesn't differ result):

$ vendor/bin/behat

The console output is:

Feature:
  In order to prove that Behat works as intended
  We want to test the home page for a phrase

  Scenario: Root Test             # features/hometest.feature:5
    When I am on the homepage     # FeatureContext::iAmOnHomepage()
    Then I should see "Laravel 5" # FeatureContext::assertPageContainsText()
      The text "Laravel 5" was not found anywhere in the text of the current page. (Behat\Mink\Exception\ResponseTextException)

--- Failed scenarios:

    features/hometest.feature:5

1 scenario (1 failed)
2 steps (1 passed, 1 failed)
0m0.12s (20.26Mb)

Why does my simple "I should see 'Laravel 5' test fail? If the localhost needs to be running, how do I run my test at the same time? When I start up the local host, nothing I type in the terminal receives a response anymore.

My directory structure of applicable folders:

app/
bootstrap/
...
features/
    bootstrap/
        FeatureContext.php
    hometest.feature
...
.env.behat
behat.yml
composer.json
...
etc.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Finally! I found via my server logs (storage/logs/laravel.log) that the page rendered contained the text "Whoops, looks like something went wrong." (obviously the wrong page). The error was "development.ERROR: exception 'RuntimeException' with message 'No supported encrypter found. The cipher and / or key length are invalid.'" There are about 50 questions and answers on StackOverflow for this, and none of them worked. After researching for days, finally I found my solution. It may be a combination of previous changes I had made, or the success could entirely be due to this command. In any case, try:

php artisan config:cache

Phew!