Output Formatters¶

Behat supports different ways of printing output information. Output printers in Behat are called formats or formatters. You can tell Behat to run with a specific formatter by providing the --format option:

$ behat --format progress

Note

The default formatter is pretty.

Behat supports 3 formatters out of the box:

pretty - prints the feature as is, with the full text of each step.
progress - prints one character per step:
junit - prints the output to xml files in the standard junit.xml format
json - prints the output to a json file in json format.

You can see the schema of this json file in the Schema definition in GitHub

If you don’t want to print output to the console, you can tell Behat to print output to a file instead of STDOUT with the --out option:

$ behat --format pretty --out report.txt

Note

Some formatters, like junit or json, always require the --out option to be specified. The junit formatter generates *.xml files for every suite, so it needs a destination directory to put these XML files into. The json formatter outputs a single file, so it needs the path of this file (which will be created if it does not exist)

Also, you can specify multiple formats to be used by Behat using multiple –format options:

$ behat --format pretty --format progress

In this case, default output will be used as output for both formatters. But if you want them to use different ones - specify them with --out:

$ behat -f pretty -o ~/pretty.out -f progress -o std
  -f junit -o xml

In this case, output of pretty formatter will be written to ~/pretty.out file, output of junit formatter will be written to xml folder and progress formatter will just print to console.

Behat tries hard to identify if your terminal supports colors or not, but sometimes it still fails. In such cases, you can force Behat to use colors (or not) with the options --colors or --no-colors, respectively:

$ behat --no-colors

Format Options¶

The formatters can be configured with some options. The following options are available for all formatters:

output_verbosity indicates the level of detail of the output. Use one of the OutputFactory::* constants
output_path indicates the path where the output should be saved. Equivalent to the --out command line option. Should be a file or folder, depending on the formatter.
output_decorate determines whether the output generated by Behat is “decorated” with formatting, such as colors, bold text, or other visual enhancements. Should be a boolean, defaults to true.
output_styles can be used to override the default styles used by Behat to display the different output elements. It should be an array where the key is the style that needs to be overridden and which points to an array of three values. The first one is the foreground color, the second one the background color and the third one an array of optional styles.

The styles available for redefinition are:

keyword style of Gherkin keywords
stdout style of stdout output
exception style of exceptions
undefined style of undefined steps
pending style of pending steps
pending_param style of pending step params
failed style of failed steps
failed_param style of failed step params
passed style of passed steps
passed_param style of passed steo params
skipped style of skipped steps
skipped_param style of skipped step params
comment style of comments
tag style of scenario/feature tags

Available colors for first two arguments (fg and bg) are: black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan and white.

Available optional styles are: bold, underscore, blink, reverse and conceal

Pretty formatter¶

The following options are specific to the Pretty formatter:

timer show time and memory usage at the end of the test run. Boolean, defaults to true.
expand print each example of a scenario outline separately. Boolean, defaults to false.
paths display the file path and line number for each scenario and the context file and method for each step. Boolean, defaults to true.
multiline print out PyStrings and TableNodes in full. Boolean, defaults to true.
showOutput show the test stdout output as part of the formatter output. Should be one of the ShowOutputOption enum values, defaults to ShowOutputOption::Yes.
shortSummary show just a list of failing scenarios at the end of the output. If false, a full summary (which also includes a list of failing steps) will be printed. Defaults to true
printSkippedSteps If the output should include any steps which are skipped by the runner. Useful when you don’t want to see all the skipped steps after a failed step. Defaults to true

Progress formatter¶

The following options are specific to the Progress formatter:

timer show time and memory usage at the end of the test run. Boolean, defaults to true.
showOutput show the test stdout output as part of the formatter output. Should be one of the ShowOutputOption enum values, defaults to ShowOutputOption::InSummary.
shortSummary show just a list of failing scenarios at the end of the output. If false, a full summary (which also includes a list of failing steps) will be printed. Defaults to false

JUnit formatter¶

The following options are specific to the JUnit formatter:

timer show time spent in each scenario and feature. Boolean, defaults to true.

JSON formatter¶

The following options are specific to the JSON formatter:

timer show time spent in each scenario, feature and suite. Boolean, defaults to true.

Setting format options¶

Format options can be set using the withFormatter() function of the Profile PHP config class. For example:

use Behat\Config\Config;
use Behat\Config\Profile;
use Behat\Config\Formatter\PrettyFormatter;

$profile = (new Profile('default'))
    ->withFormatter((new PrettyFormatter(paths: false))
        ->withOutputStyles([
            'comment' => [
                'black', 'white',
                ['underscore', 'bold']
            ]
        ])
    )
;

return (new Config())->withProfile($profile);

These options can also be set on the command line by using the: --format-setting option which accepts a json object with this configuration. For example:

$ behat --format-settings='{\"paths\": false}'

Disabling a formatter¶

You can disable a formatter so that it won’t be available by using the disableFormatter() function of the Profile PHP config class. For example:

use Behat\Config\Config;
use Behat\Config\Profile;
use Behat\Config\Formatter\PrettyFormatter;

$profile = (new Profile('default'))
    ->disableFormatter(PrettyFormatter::NAME)
;

return (new Config())->withProfile($profile);