Question

I have a simple Behat feature that uses Mink for testing webapp which domain is, say http://myapp.localhost (I have a record like 127.0.0.1 myapp.localhost in my hosts file).

The problem is, when I run the feature, all what Mink driver gets when it browses to any URL in the app (e.g. with When I go to "/some/url" step) is an error page from proxy-server, saying that domain myapp.localhost cannot be resolved. Proxy server address is set by env. variable: export http_proxy=....

External websites work just fine (like an example with Wikipedia from Behat docs).

My browser can reach the app because there is a setting telling the browser not to use proxy when domain is *.localhost.

How to force Mink to ignore proxy?

Spent an hour today to pin down the problem.

Answer 1

The solution I use is not very elegant, but it’s the simplest way I can think of. I have some sort of build tool written in Bash, which has a following function to invoke Behat:

function run_behat {
  local http_proxy_backup=$http_proxy
  export http_proxy=;

  bin/behat $@ # passing all args to behat
  # if you use phar version of behat, it will be like `php behat.phar $@`

  export http_proxy=$http_proxy_backup
}

Basically, I just temporarily set http_proxy to empty value, call behat, and then restore http_proxy initial value.

It is invoked from my script like that:

if [ $1 == "behat" ]; then 
  run_behat ${*:2}; # pass all args but 1st
fi