Oro Behat Debugging

Debugging Oro Commerce v6.1 Behat Tests

Debugging Flow

Cheapest signal first; most failures resolve at steps 1-3.

1. Read the failure output and var/log/<env>.log — "element not found" is often a 500. The cause is in the server log, not the Behat trace.
2. Re-run with -v / -vv / -vvv — matched step definition, then hook execution, then the full matcher trace. One level at a time.
3. Capture state — And I take screenshot (ScreenshotTrait captures the cursor, unless an alert shows); dump($variable) inside a Context.
   • Several plausible gates? One diagnostic step, not N runs — a @Then I dump X for :arg that queries every candidate and throws the combined state: references/breadth-first-diagnostics.md.
4. Isolate the scenario — a failing 3-step scenario tells you far more than a failing 30-step one.
5. --stop-on-failure — tight loop on a single failing scenario.
6. Intermittent is an AJAX race, not a flake — references/ajax-flake.md. And I wait is not a fix.
7. Wrong logic inside a Context: attach Xdebug — below.

Xdebug Split-Process Debugging

The part the Oro docs gloss over. Runner and application are two PHP processes: bin/behat holds Contexts, steps, elements, fixtures; PHP-FPM holds controllers, services, listeners. Xdebug on one misses everything on the other — two targets, two ports.

CLI attaches via XDEBUG_MODE=debug XDEBUG_SESSION=1 php bin/behat …; FPM only when the browser session carries the XDEBUG_SESSION cookie, set from a @BeforeScenario hook. Snippets, path mapping, silent failures: references/xdebug-split.md.

Step Discovery

Don't guess step wording; list it, and generate skeletons rather than writing them:

php bin/behat -dl -s OroUserBundle                 # names only
php bin/behat -di -s OroUserBundle                 # names + descriptions + examples
php bin/behat path/to/your.feature --dry-run --append-snippets --snippets-type=regex

Tag filtering and the verbosity progression: references/step-discovery.md.

Key Pitfalls

1. waitForAjax on non-jQuery requests. It tracks only jQuery-registered XHR, so native fetch() and raw XMLHttpRequest never enter its queue and it returns while the request is in flight. Wait for an observable DOM state instead.
2. Committing And I wait for action. It blocks on stdin until you press return — fine locally, but CI hangs until timeout. A pre-commit grep pays for itself.
3. Path mapping misconfigured in split-process Xdebug. When container paths differ from the IDE's, breakpoints silently do not fire — no error, no warning. Verify with a trivial breakpoint on a known-loaded file first.

See Also

In references/: xdebug-split.md · step-discovery.md · ajax-flake.md · breadth-first-diagnostics.md · performance-tmpfs.md (PostgreSQL in tmpfs) · v6.1.md · v7.0.md

Writing tests: oro-behat-testing. Remote/staging: oro-e2e-testing. Upstream: Oro Debug Behat Tests