The QaFoo blog has a new post today showing you how to use Mink with PHPUnit. Mink is a testing tool that allows you to write tests as if they were happening through a browser.

Another day for a short PHPUnit trick. If you want to use PHPunit to control a browser for functional or acceptence tests, then you can easily do this using the Mink library. Mink is well known from the Behat community to facilitate Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD), but it is a standalone library that can be used with PHPUnit just as easily.

This is more flexible than using dedicated browser abstractions such as Selenium directly from PHPunit, because you can switch between different implementations or even run tests with multiple implementations using the same code base.

They start with the command you'll need to get Mink installed via Composer (a simple require) and come example code for a test on the Wikipedia site (the page about PHP). They then refactor this a bit to remove the boostrapping of the Mink client into a reusable trait, making it simpler to use in other tests. They also refactor the test to use the trait and include the phpunit.xml configuration needed to run it.