DrevOps Co-Maintains Drupal Behat Stack, Ships Coordinated Alpha Releases

Staff Reporter

Coordinated alpha releases across Drupal’s Behat testing stack mark a major maintenance effort led by co-maintainer Alex Skrypnyk and the DrevOps team. The releases include Drupal Driver 3.0.0-alpha1, Drupal Extension 6.0.0-alpha1, and behat-steps 3.8.0 after six months of engineering work focused on stabilisation, backlog reduction, and architectural redesign. The projects form a core part of Drupal’s behaviour-driven testing ecosystem used for automated validation of site functionality and workflows.

The Drupal Behat stack enables developers to define site behaviour in plain language and validate it through automated tests. The projects had faced maintenance slowdowns, affecting compatibility with newer PHP and Drupal versions, prompting DrevOps to step in as co-maintainers.

The first phase focused on maintainability. Continuous integration now tests across PHP 8.2 to 8.4 and Drupal 10 and 11, supported by tools such as PHPStan, PHPCS, and Rector. Code coverage thresholds were introduced, with Drupal Driver reaching 95% and Drupal Extension 70%.

Testing was expanded to include kernel-level validation and full Behat suites running against live Drupal environments. A downstream validation process was also added to prevent integration breakages between the driver and extension.

The team then addressed long-standing contribution backlogs, merging older pull requests and resolving bugs with test coverage. Ten community contributions were integrated into Drupal Driver with attribution to the original authors.

New major versions introduce architectural changes. Drupal Driver 3.x adopts a capability-based interface model and redesigned field handling, while Drupal Extension 6.x updates step-definition conventions and configuration structures. The releases require PHP 8.2 or higher and drop support for older Drupal versions.

The coordinated alpha releases mark a transition point, with maintainers inviting testing and feedback from Drupal projects to validate upgrade paths and identify remaining issues.

Reference: Becoming maintainers of the Drupal Driver and Drupal Extension projects, DrevOps (4 May 2026)

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