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Drupal Testing

Drupal is a widely used open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP that is used to build websites. Its feature-rich platform makes it flexible and a popular choice for CMS web development. Like any other website, a website built with Drupal requires thorough testing.

Let's dive deeper into the Drupal ecosystem and understand how to test these websites using the tools that are provided within the Drupal ecosystem and also look into other efficient tools to achieve a seamless user experience.

What is Drupal?

Drupal is a powerful CMS that is largely used to create websites. Many government agencies, educational institutions, and businesses build their websites using Drupal.

Advantages of Using Drupal

Some advantages of adopting Drupal to build your website are:

Drupal is an open-source framework.
It is a flexible platform that works well with different content types. It is adopted as a CMS as well as a development platform. With provisions for custom content types and views, to name a few of the available features, Drupal is truly a flexible platform.
Drupal is great for complex projects and websites due to its feature-rich platform.
It is SEO friendly, allowing the website author to add tags and keywords.
It provides a secure platform for building a website.
Has a lot of add-on options for custom themes and modules, providing full control over the visual display of content on the website.
The Drupal community is active and responsive. Hence it is easy to find answers to the most common challenges and get help from the community.

How Can You Test These Websites?

Testing websites built using Drupal primarily rely on PHP, JavaScript, and Drupal extensions, with the PHPUnit framework at the heart of it. Following are the ways to test these websites:

Unit testing
Kernel testing
End-to-end testing

Drupal Unit Testing

Use the PHPUnit testing framework for Drupal unit testing as a foundation for your testing strategy. PHPUnit installation is straightforward: just run composer require --dev phpunit/phpunit in the root directory of your Drupal project.

Once you start creating unit tests, just keep these basic rules in mind:

The base class \Drupal\Tests\UnitTestCase is implemented to create unit test cases. This class provides helpers and a base class for writing unit tests.
All unit test file names should follow *Test.php pattern
All method names should follow test* pattern (e.g.: testGetLocation())

Here's an example of a unit test case:

<?php

namespace Drupal\phpunit_my_example;

class Unit {

  private $length = 0;

  public function setLength(int $length) {
    $this->length = $length;
  }

  public function getLength() {
    return $this->length;
  }

}

Drupal Kernel Testing

This type of testing is an intermediate between unit testing and functional testing, helping to verify the integrations of various modules. With kernel testing, you can test limited Drupal interactions. However, it does not apply to those test scenarios that require browser or UI interactions.

Kernel tests operate in a partial Drupal environment, meaning only the core of Drupal is enabled. The base class \Drupal\KernelTests\KernelTestBase is implemented to write kernel test cases. This base class partially boots Drupal for these tests and allows the loading of services and hooks of other modules.

When it comes to any modules, they will need to be enabled manually. To install, use:

::installSchema () for database tables
::installConfig () for default configuration
::installEntitySchema () for, you guessed it - entities

Here's what a simple test case written as a method looks like:

public function testLabel() {
  $label = $this->myService->getLabel('my_service_test');
  $this->assertTrue($label == 'My Test Label', $label);
}

public function testMessage() {
  $message = $this->myService->getMessage('my_service_test');
  $this->assertTrue($message == 'My Test Message', $message);
}

To run your tests, you can either use PHPUnit (although you won't get a very detailed output), or a run-tests.sh script - which is already included with each Drupal installation. We recommend using this script since it provides a much nicer and more detailed output.

Drupal End-to-end Testing

Functional tests are meant to consider entire features, not just bits and pieces of code. They can be done using the following:

Browser testing
Javascript based testing
Using Selenium-based tools
testRigor

Drupal Browser Testing

These tests have the full Drupal functionality and an internally simulated web browser at their disposal. These tests are meant to test top-level tests of integrations between different Drupal systems. They are usually written for scenarios where JavaScript testing is not involved. The base class \Drupal\Tests\BrowserTestBase is involved in writing browser test cases.

In case you've previously had a chance to use WebTestBase, then BrowserTestBase is what replaces it, and you should be able to convert your old tests to BrowserTestBase rather easily.

Here's all the detailed information you would need to get familiar with these tests.

Drupal JavaScript Testing

In comparison to other tests, the JavaScript function tests in Drupal are executed in an actual browser to test JavaScript and AJAX functionalities.The base class \Drupal\FunctionalJavascriptTests\WebDriverTestBase is implemented to write JavaScript test cases. This base class runs a driver that is able to support JavaScript.

To get familiar with how to write JavaScript test cases for drupal, take a look at this detailed tutorial.

Functional UI End-to-end Testing With testRigor

Tests created with testRigor are the closest to representing the actual behavior of your users. Tests are on the UI layer, meaning that no details of implementation are involved. And while end-to-end tests typically represent the entire flows, they are known to be the most fragile and slow. Not with testRigor! Tests are extremely robust and stable, and test maintenance issues are completely solved, with users now spending 95% less time on test maintenance.

The best part is that testRigor is a cloud-hosted codeless solution, meaning that anyone on the team will be able to create, edit, and maintain such tests. You can create tests going through an entire user flow in plain English, and get test results with detailed screenshots for each step - making it extremely easy to debug.

There are a lot of handy built-in features; for example, testRigor is great for testing tables. You can also easily test emails and SMS alerts.

Here's a sample test for testing a table:

open url "https://testrigor.com/samples/table1/"
enter "This is a trap!" into table "table table-responsive table-striped table-hover table-bordered" at row "101" and column "Additional Data"

And another one for testing an email:

send email to "user@customer.com" with subject "Test message" and  body "Hi, new content is available."
check that email from "user@customer.com" is delivered

You can find more benefits of using testRigor here.

Conclusion

Like testing any other website, Drupal-based websites also require unit testing, kernel testing, and end-to-end testing. We hope that this article provides you with the tools needed to build a robust testing strategy - and make your customers satisfied with high-quality software.

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