Codeception/Symfony4 Environment variable not found: "DATABASE_URL"

Question

I have a project in Symfony4 with doctrine DB, everything flies.

I would like to add some functional and unit testing with Codeception. I followed the docs and added this to my functional.suite.yml:

actor: FunctionalTester
modules:
    enabled:
        - Symfony:
            app_path: 'src'
            environment: 'test'
        - Doctrine2:
            depends: Symfony
#            cleanup: true
        - \Helper\Functional
#       - Db
    step_decorators: ~

However, when running vendor/bin/codecept run I get an ugly:

In EnvVarProcessor.php line 131:

Environment variable not found: "DATABASE_URL".

I can't see anything else related in the docs, so not sure what I'm missing.

I wonder what bin/console about --env=test shows in comparison to --env=dev — Jakumi

callmebob callmebob · Accepted Answer · 2019-09-04T07:10:18

I can't unfortunately explain the mechanisms behind it, but to resolve it I had to add DATABASE_URL environment variable to my OS.

export DATABASE_URL='mysql: ...';

This seemed very weird solution to me (which, again, I have no idea why Codeception would require this), so I kept digging. Something I discovered later, but seems actually cause the whole situation is how I installed Codeception. If you go to codeception docs you can read:

If you don't plan to do acceptance testing, you can get minimal installation of Codeception by requiring codeception/base

EDIT July 2020: Information about minimal install was removed from the linked website, looks like Codeception doesn't provide that option anymore.

This was how I had it installed. After playing around a lot I pulled a version of my code before codeception and installed using composer require codeception/codeception --dev (so the full version). After installing this way I had no issues.

Codeception/Symfony4 Environment variable not found: "DATABASE_URL"

2 Answers