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Generator tool

Introduction​

The Generator tool is a Moodle administration tool that allows you to generate test data for your Moodle site. It is helpful for testing and development purposes, as it can create a large number of users, courses, and other entities in a short time.

The tool provides several features to help you generate test data, such as:

  1. Make test course: Create a course with a specified number of sections, activities and enrolled users.
  2. Create testing scenarios: can execute behat generators on the current instance.
  3. Test plan: generates JMeter test plans for the current instance.
  4. Make test site: Create a site with a specified number of courses, users, and activities.

Generator requirements​

All generator tools are meant to be used in a development environment only. To prevent accidental use in a production environment, the generator tools require the instance to have the debug level set to developer.

To set the debug level to developer, go to Site administration > Development > Debugging and set the debug messages to DEVELOPER: extra Moodle debug messages for developers.

Create a test course​

Creating a testing course could be done on both web and CLI.

To create the course via web, go to Site administration > Development > Make test course. Once there, you can specify the course size, short name, full name, and description. The tool will create a course with some activities, and some users enrolled.

To create the course via CLI, you can use the following command:

php admin/tool/generator/cli/maketestcourse.php --shortname=SIZE_S --size=S

Create a testing scenario using behat generators​

The Generator tool allows you to execute behat generators on the current instance. This can be done on the web or the CLI.

Before executing the behat generators, you need to have the feature file you want to execute. It is important to note that the tool does not use selenium or any other browser wrapper.

This means:

  1. The tool will only execute generator steps. If any other type of step is present in the feature file, it will show a parsing error.
  2. For now, the tool can only execute normal scenarios. It does not support background, outline, or scenario outline scenarios.

To execute the behat generators via web, go to Site administration > Development > Create testing scenarios. Once there, you can upload the feature file you want to execute and see the the execution results.

To execute the behat generators via CLI, you can use the following command:

php admin/tool/generator/cli/runtestscenario.php --feature=/path/to/some/testing/scenario.feature