LAMPlights » crimson

Bootstrapping PHPUnit tests

Herman Radtke — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 07:18:26 +0000

I just recently stumbled upon PHPUnit's --bootstrap flag. I used to bootstrap each of my unit tests using a require statement at the top of the file. I always found this very tedious, but did not want to write some script to wrap each unit test. The --bootstrap flag solves this problem quite nicely.

My unit tests used to look something like this:

require_once dirname(__FILE__) . '/../TestHelper.php';
 
class FooTest extends \PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase { ... }

This allowed me to run the tests as part of a suite or run them individually. This worked fine, but it was annoying to always have to make sure the require_once statement was correct. As I create tests in sub-directories I would often forget this. I can now remove the require statement and run the unit test with the following command:

phpunit --bootstrap TestHelper.php crimsontest/FooTest.php

I create a runtests.sh script so I don't have to manually type the phpunit command plus the required flag:

#!/bin/bash
DIR=`dirname $0`
phpunit --bootstrap $DIR/TestHelper.php $DIR/crimsontest/AllTests.php

I already updated all the unit tests in the Crimson framework to use a the bootstrap strategy.

Crimson Framework Updated to PHP 5.3

Herman Radtke — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 05:43:34 +0000

I have updated my Crimson framework to use PHP 5.3 namespace support instead of the old PEAR style class namespacing. I did this primarily as an exercise in migrating a code-base to use namespaces. Just in case anyone was relying on the old framework code, there is a pre-5.3 branch on github.

Along the way I decided to deviate from the separate component structure and merge all components into a single framework structure. It is still my goal to keep dependencies within the framework to a minimum, but I felt the extra work required to maintain each component separately was not worth it. This was especially the case for the unit tests. Each component required a considerable amount of boilerplate code to bootstrap and run the tests. I was able to reduce the amount of boilerplate considerably by merging the tests into one suite. I have been following the developments of Zend Framework 2.0 to see what major changes they are making. I think the large overhaul to the ZF2 tests section was a significant influence on my decision to do some overhaul myself.

I have also added some additional features to the framework that I will be talking about in a later post.

Crimson framework PHP 5.3 branch

Herman Radtke — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 05:48:05 +0000

I have added a PHP 5.3 branch to the Crimson framework. The code now uses namespaces and has a native namespace autoloader. Some of the classes were renamed to conform with the PHP Framework Standards Group preliminary standard.

For the time being I will be keeping a 5.2 and 5.3 version of the Crimson framework until PHP 5.3 becomes even more stable.