I recently joined a company that uses codeigniter. I have been using nodejs and rails a ton so I feel like I am missing BDD like tools (rspec/jasmine/mocha). Does PHP and/or CodeIgniter have any sort of CLI based testing suite. If so, how should I structure my app? Any good conventions that can be followed?
There's a project called CIUnit that integrates phpunit to codeigniter and provides some helpful functions, and make it a generally pleasant experience. Unfortunately the official branch is stopped at CI version 1.7.2, but there's a fork that I've been using for 2.1.2.
This gives you the usual xUnit style test suites, code coverage report generators, selenium integration, mock and stub objects and such.
Two most popular PHP BDD frameworks should work just fine with any PHP project:
Today's best solution would be PHPUnit and Selenium. I wrote articles covering the usage here: