Published on May 29, 2012

This evening I released Codeception 1.0.9. The most important thing you may notice is documentation. It’s just better. It was improved by Jon Phipps. Better phrasing goes to better understanding, right? But let’s move on to see the actual new features.

Zombies are coming!

Two new modules were intoduced by Alexander Bogdanov @synchrone. It’s new Selenium2 module and ZombieJS.

Ok, you may know about Selenium. But what is the purpose of Zombie?

Tools like ZombieJS, (PhantomJS, and more) are built in order to run tests without a browser. And so they are called headless. They don’t require a browser window to start, they don’t show any interactions on screen.

Why do we need browser for testing web applications? Only browser-based javascript engines can run all the client side code. ZombieJS is one of them, taken from browser and produced as a standalone tool. It’s built with Node.js and requires Node.js, NPM, a C++ compiler and Python to install. Check out it’s official site for more information.

Thanks to Mink from now on you can write ZombieJS tests inside Codeception just like tests for other cases.

Don’t run too fast!

Selenium and Selenium2 modules was updated with the new delay option. If Selenium performs actions faster the user, and javascript just can’t catch it it, you can slow down the execution by setting the delay param. It’s set in milliseconds and will perform pauses after each step in scenarios.

Composer Tricks

Seems like the PHP WebScrapper Goutte (which is used by PHPBroser module) has a new backend now. It has moved from Zend Framework 2 libraries to new lightweight HTTP client Guzzle. So, no more Zend dependencies and long stack trackes. This change doesn’t affect PEAR users, cause this change arrive in PEAR packages yet.

Thanks again to all contributors and reporters.

Please update Codeception version via PEAR:

$ pear install codeception/Codeception

or via Composer