How to wait for Selenium to start during Codeception tests

Automatically Start and Wait for Selenium During Your Codeception PHP Tests: A Tutorial - tips to avoid using the wait and sleep commands.

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If you test using PHP and Codeception you may have run into the issue of how to start Selenium before your tests. Some people use a wait or sleep command but here is a tip to automatically start Selenium during tests and wait for it to start:

Configure acceptance.suite.yml

With the RunProcess extension with can add a special timeout wait command to wait for Selenium to start before starting our tests:

actor: AcceptanceTester
extensions:
    enabled:
        - Codeception\Extension\RunFailed
        # the lines will run the selenium server before tests start and wait for the process to answer on port 4444
        - Codeception\Extension\RunProcess:
            - java -Dwebdriver.gecko.driver=./geckodriver -jar selenium-server.jar
            - "timeout 300 bash -c 'while [[ \"$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w ''%{http_code}'' localhost:4444)\" != '200' ]]; do sleep 5; done' || false"
modules:
    enabled:
        - WebDriver:
           url: "https://playground.mailslurp.com"
           browser: firefox
        - \Helper\Acceptance
step_decorators: ~

That's it!

More information

For more tips on testing with Codeception see the PHP guide.