Testing email delivery of a TYPO3 extension with Codeception, MailHog and GitHub Actions

Some weeks ago I published my blogpost about how to create a GitHub Actions build pipeline for a TYPO3 Extension that executes Unit-, Functional- and Acceptance tests. The extension tested in that blogpost was only a simple demo extension and for me this was a preparation to finally migrate the CI pipeline for my TYPO3 extension sf_event_mgt to GitHub Actions.

The extension comes with lots of unit and functional tests, which are automatically executed on each commit. One missing piece in the puzzle was the automatic execution of my Acceptance Tests, which are based on Codeception and additionally require MailHog in order to test if emails are sent by the extension and if the email content is as expected.

The concept of testing emails in Acceptance Tests using Codeception is really simple. You have to add the composer package ericmartel/codeception-email-mailhog to your dev dependencies and then you are ready to test emails as shown in the abstract of one of my tests below:

$I->fetchEmails();  
$I->haveUnreadEmails();  
$I->haveNumberOfUnreadEmails(2);  
$I->openNextUnreadEmail();  
$I->seeInOpenedEmailSubject('New unconfirmed registration for event "Event (reg, cat1) ' . $this->lang . '"');  
$I->seeInOpenedEmailRecipients('[email protected]');  
$I->openNextUnreadEmail();  
$I->seeInOpenedEmailSubject('Your registration for event "Event (reg, cat1) ' . $this->lang . '"');  
$I->seeInOpenedEmailRecipients('[email protected]');

It is also possible to check the email body for various content like I do in other parts of my testsuite.

GitHub Actions supports docker based service containers and MailHog is also available as docker container, so in order to execute my Acceptance testsuite I added MailHog as service container to my CI setup as shown below:

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-18.04
    services:
      mailhog:
      image: mailhog/mailhog
      ports:
        - 1025:1025
        - 8025:8025

Having the MailHog container in place, the execution of the Acceptance Tests works like a charm.

Since the Acceptance Tests also cover tests of a plugin that is only accessible by logged in frontend users, the TYPO3 website for Acceptance Tests includes a special configured page with ext:felogin for this scenario. It turned out, that those tests failed on GitHub actions, since Argon2i was not available on the testing runner for whatever reasons. In order to resolve this problem, I configured the TYPO3 website to use BcryptPasswordHash instead of Argon2i which is ok for me, since strong password hashes are not really required in this scenario.

The GitHub actions YAML file is currently available in the development branch of my extension.

The CI results including a downloadable Codeception HTML report for all acceptance tests is available for each build as shown in this example: https://github.com/derhansen/sf_event_mgt/actions/runs/142799855