Behat Unused Step Definitions Extension

Do you have a large Behat test suite? Would you like to check your feature contexts for unused step definitions? This Behat extension detects and reports step definitions that are not being used in any of your *.feature files.

Installation

composer require --dev nicwortel/behat-unused-step-definitions-extension

Activate the extension in your behat.yml:

default:
  extensions:
    NicWortel\BehatUnusedStepDefinitionsExtension\Extension: ~

Usage

After following the installation steps as documented above, simply run Behat. Instead of actually executing the tests, a dry run will be enough to collect information about unused step definitions:

vendor/bin/behat --dry-run

Note that if you have multiple suites, the unused step definitions will be listed per suite after the suite has finished.

Filtering the results

Include / exclude

There are projects where it's important to avoid some step definitions to be detected. For instance, when a project wants to avoid scanning unused step definitions from the third-party packages/libraries and show only results from the custom code. The extension allows to configure a list of regular expressions to include or exclude step definitions in the behat.yml configuration file. Expressions are compared against the FQCN + method name (My\Namespace\ClassName::methodName):

default:
  extensions:
    NicWortel\BehatUnusedStepDefinitionsExtension\Extension:
      filters:
        include:
          - '/MyProject\\Behat\\Contexts/'
          - '/OtherProject\\Behat\\(Foo|Bar)Context/'
        exclude:
          - '/MyProject\\Behat\\Contexts\\FeatureContext/'
          - '/::excludedMethod/'
          - '/OtherProject\\Behat\\FooContext::.+Method/'

Ignore pattern aliases

Example:

/**
 * @Then I take a screenshot
 * @Then I take a screenshot :name
 */
public function takeScreenshot(?string $name = NULL): void {
  // Step implementation.
}

If I take a screenshot is used but I take a screenshot :name is not, enabling ignorePatternAliases: true will prevent the latter from being reported as unused.

default:
  extensions:
    NicWortel\BehatUnusedStepDefinitionsExtension\Extension:
      ignorePatternAliases: true

Extending

By default, the extension uses the unused_step_definitions_printer printer, shipped in the package. The printer displays the list of unused step definitions in the console. Third-party Behat extension might provide different printers (e.g. one may build a text file with the list of unused step definitions). A custom printer should be defined as a container service and should implement the \NicWortel\BehatUnusedStepDefinitionsExtension\UnusedStepDefinitionsPrinter interface. Using a custom printer is possible by providing its service ID in the behat.yml configuration file:

default:
  extensions:
    NicWortel\BehatUnusedStepDefinitionsExtension\Extension:
      printer: my_custom_printer