Moodle Hat

Moodle Hat is a Vagrant configuration which provisions a Moodle instance with Behat Acceptance testing and PHPUnit testing configured. It uses a headless Selenium server for Javascript testing. It supports LDAP tests and has optional xdebug support.

Overview

Purpose

Configuring Behat and Selenium isn't one of my favorite things. This project provides a relatively quick and painless way to create that environment for testing. PHPUnit testing is included as well for completeness.

How to Use

These instructions assume a basic familiarity with Vagrant. Run vagrant up after the initial clone and vagrant provision after updates. The Moodle instance may be accessed at http://local.moodle.test. The default credentials are admin/P4ssw0rd!.

Behat

Open two ssh sessions to the vagrant box. In the first, run selenium. This relies on a bash alias to launch the headless Selenium server. In the second window, do this:

• cd /var/www/moodle/htdocs (default location of Moodle)
• behat (runs all Behat tests)

behat is a shell script which creates reports within /var/www/behat/ and calls the local vendor binary. You may append standard arguments such as behat --tags @core_blog, which would execute core_blog tests only. The reports may be accessed via the command line or at http://behat.moodle.test.

PHPUnit

PHPUnit tests may be invoked normally from the command line on the vagrant host. To run the tests with xdebug support, use this syntax:

php -d xdebug.profiler_enable=on vendor/bin/phpunit ...

Profiles are logged to /tmp on the virtual machine and may be inspected at http://webgrind.moodle.test, which runs Webgrind.

Cron

Cron is enabled by default under the www-data user. It logs to /var/www/cron. You may view the logs at http://cron.moodle.test.

Software requirements

Moodle Hat requires recent versions of both Vagrant and VirtualBox to be installed. You also need the vagrant-hostsupdater plugin.

Running the full suite of acceptance tests takes several hours. If you experience timeouts, try increasing the amount of memory in the Vagrantfile.

Database support

Both MySQL and PostgreSQL are installed and configured; the database schemas are named moodle and are accessed by that same username and password. Moodle is installed on MySQL by default; to use PostgreSQL instead change the database driver in config.php and reinstall.

Known issues

• The initial provisioning task can take a long time because it clones the Moodle git repository from GitHub.
• If you destroy and re-create the VM, you need to delete config.php inside the shared moodle/ folder, otherwise core Moodle won't re-install.

Copyright / License

Moodle Hat was originally developed at Lafayette College and is available under the GPL2 license.

Acknowledgements

The headless Selenium portion of this project borrows heavily from David Adams' blog post Behat And Selenium In Vagrant.