Talking with the Unit Tests

I had the very bad idea to try browser testing, writing some code on top of Laravel Dusk for an application of mine.

Apart the quantity of time wasted to instrument the test for every action (scroll a little down to reach the Save button, add some artifical pause to wait a modal window to open or to close...) and the quantity of times it fails executing simple operations (e.g. random characters skipped while writing into an input box, generating then a failing assertion on input validation) and the amount of totally random behaviours (the same test fails five times in a row, then runs correctly for no apparent reason), I had to try and fail several times to run them on Github Actions.

Laravel's documentation provides some (very appreciated) hint about it, but I had to manage a specific use case.

My application expects the browser to use an Italian locale, especially to format dates in <input type="date"> boxes. And, of course, the default locale for runners on GitHub Actions is English, so dates were formatted in different ways and failed to be correctly managed.

I had to add a pair of lines on my GitHub Workflow file:

...

- name: setup
  run: |
    [existing stuff]
    sudo locale-gen it_IT.UTF-8
    sudo update-locale LANG=it_IT.UTF-8
    [more stuff]

...

before the execution of Chrome Driver, to install and use my required locale, then in code/tests/DuskTestCase.php I added a line in the driver() function:

return $items->merge([
    '--disable-gpu',
    '--headless',
    '--lang=it', // THIS ONE
]);

So the headless browser executed for the tests has an Italian locale, and everything works fine.

At least, until the next randomly skipped character into an input box...