Prerequisites: system setup

To try this article, you need:

• a Drupal 7.x installation;
• drush.

System setup is not covered by this article.

In the following article, let's say:

• we got a Drupal 7.x website running at http://example.com:80/
• we got drush installed and "drush" command is in the shell's PATH
• we execute commands from Drupal root.

Create Drupal tests: example with the predictable_tests module

The creation of Drupal tests is not covered by this article.

You can follow simpletest module documentation [1].

In this article, we are to use the predictable_tests [2] module. It registers tests that always or never pass. We will use these tests to:

• try tests that passes and others that fails;
• use "quick" tests. Standards tests bundled with Drupal or simpletest are quite slow to run. So predictable_tests will save us time.

Install simpletest

# Download and install simpletest
drush dl simpletest
drush en simpletest

Install modules to test (here: predictable_tests)

Predictable_tests is currently at "sandbox" stage on drupal.org, so you can't (or I don't know how to) download it with drush. So let's fetch it manually from Github:

# Download and install predictable_tests manually
git clone git://github.com/makinacorpus/drupal-predictable_tests.git sites/all/modules/predictable_tests
drush en predictable_tests

Set English as default language

There currently are issues in simpletest: testrunner fails if you don't use Drupal's default builtin language (i.e. English).
In development or integration environments (i.e. *do not do this on production!*), you can use the drush_language module:

drush dl drush_language
drush en drush_language
drush language-default en

And don't forget to switch back to the former default language later...

Running tests with scripts/run-tests.sh

Let's consider some examples using run-tests.sh script bundled with Drupal... We will see how to reproduce these actions with Drush later.

Notice that:

• run-tests.sh is not a SH script, but a PHP one!
• If --xml folder does not exist or is not writeable, you get no errors!
• In my case, I had to specify the php interpreter, even if:
  • "which php" returns the good result
  • I execute the command with the php interpreter, so I'd like it recognized himself...

php scripts/run-tests.sh --php /usr/bin/php PredictableTests
# 1 fail, 2 pass

You can export results as XML files:

# Make sure the directory exists and you can write to it.
mkdir -p ~/var/drupal/tests
ls -al ~/var/drupal/tests
# If you provide a relative path to --xml option, it is considered relative
# to Drupal root.
# If you want the output to be outside Drupal root, use an absolute path.
php scripts/run-tests.sh --php /usr/bin/php --xml ~/var/drupal/tests PredictableTests

Running tests with drush

Drush is the recommended way to go.

I don't know wether it is possible to execute a single test within a test group with run-tests.sh. It is easy with Drush.

# Learn usage
drush help test-run

# See available test classes
drush test-run

# Execute "PredictableTests" group of tests
drush test-run --uri=http://example.com/ PredictableTests

# Execute only "PredictableUnitTest"
drush test-run --uri=http://example.com/ PredictableTests

# Execute only "PredictableUnitTest" with XML output as files
# As with run-tests.sh, value of --xml is relative to Drupal root or make
# sure to provide an absolute path.
# Notice that the --xml syntax uses a "=" with drush and a space with
# run-tests.sh.
mkdir -p ~/var/drupal/tests
drush test-run --uri=http://example.com/ --xml=~/var/drupal/tests PredictableUnitTest

References