There are some occasions when I want my Drupal Behat tests to perform some action as a user that already exists on the Drupal site. For example, I have a test install profile with some Default Content (users, nodes, taxonomy terms, etc.), and it already has a large set of default test data set up on the site for the benefit of developers who need to work on theming/site building.

Rather than define a ton of extra Behat steps to re-create all this test content and these test users, I just want Behat to log in as an existing user and perform actions with the pre-existing content.

Note that this might not be a good idea depending on the structure or philosophy of your site's testing. As a general principle, state should be avoided—and that includes things like 'having a set of default stuff already existing before a test runs'. However, in the real world there are situations where it's a ton easier to just use the state that exists 🙃.

The problem

Out of the box, the Drupal API Driver lets you create a user in a Scenario and then use that created user, like so: