On the VG Tech blog there's a recent post showing you how you can use the built-in PHP web server to help with running your Behat (a behavior-driven development tool) tests.
Behat is a tool for running acceptance tests for your application. If your application is a web application you will need a web server to execute your tests. [...] Some weeks back I wrote a post showing you how to use PHP's built in web server in PHPUnit. This post will show you how to do the same for Behat when running your acceptance tests.
His example (here on github) shows you how to set up Behat via Composer, run it and start in on your first test. In the test's "setUp" method, it calls out to the command line and starts up the built-in web server if it's not already running. It also checks to see if it can connect to the server to make sure it's accessible. Then, in the "tearDown" method, there's a call to kill off the PHP process based on the PID stored on startup.
Link: http://tech.vg.no/2013/08/16/using-phps-built-in-web-server-in-behat-tests
