Andrew Kirkpatrick

If you prefer to use a client for MySQL such as Workbench, you can connect to the MySQL service in your Vagrant Virtual Machine by using SSH tunnelling. Run “vagrant ssh-config” to get the information you need to configure your client correctly.

vagrant ssh-config

Host default
 HostName 127.0.0.1
 User vagrant
 Port 2222
 UserKnownHostsFile /dev/null
 StrictHostKeyChecking no
 PasswordAuthentication no
 IdentityFile /Users/akirkpatrick/Projects/api/puphpet/files/dot/ssh/id_rsa
 IdentityFile /Users/akirkpatrick/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key
 IdentitiesOnly yes
 LogLevel FATAL

You should see 2 keys listed under IdentityFile, use the path of the first one (not the insecure one) as the location for your SSH Key File in a new Standard TCP/IP over SSH connection in Workbench or an equivalent client. The SSH connection will be over whichever port Vagrant is forwarding (usually 2222, see the Port from the ssh-config output) with the user “vagrant” and the MySQL connection details will be whatever credentials are allowed to connect from within the VM.

Being able to save a screenshot from Behat via one of it’s drivers is very useful to find out what went wrong, especially on headless browsers such as PhantomJS. Previously I’ve saved these to the filesystem as per a handy UCSF guide and updated myself for Behat 3.

However if you do not have easy access to the filesystem where Behat is being run, such as your Continuous Integration server (especially container-based solutions like Travis where it will get destroyed after each build) then it may be handy to upload it to somewhere and output the URL in your build logs. This is a quick solution for uploading to Imgur.

You will need to create an Imgur account and register your application to obtain a client ID.

Please note this is a quick and dirty example, as it should ideally use Guzzle to talk to the Imgur API and use external configuration, but since people may want to use different image hosting services or methods I left it fairly basic for now.

If you are using Behat with Selenium server and running locally, if is firing up real browser instances via web driver then it is easy to see what may be going wrong. However if you are using a headless browser such as PhantomJS this makes it impossible, unless you take screenshots when an error has occured (a failed step in your scenario)

I used a handy UCSF guide for taking screenshots with Behat 2 and updated it for Behat 3

If you have an application that you are trying to test locally (such as on a Vagrant VM) or on a development server that has a self-signed certificate, Behat will probably complain of an SSL certificate problem because of an invalid certificate chain (GuzzleHttp\Exception\RequestException)

This is because Guzzle (the http client used by Goutte, the default Mink driver) believes the connection to be insecure, which technically it is, but for testing purposes we can ignore this.

If your application (or stack) is configured for https only at all times this means you can’t switch to http to test, since that would be testing configuration that is not representative of your live environment. To circumvent this you can disable SSL verification for cURL in Guzzle.