Michael Peacock - North East freelance web developer, author, entrepreneur

PHPUnit on WAMP

At Peacock Carter, we wanted to setup PHPUnit on our local development machines, all of which are Windows. The instructions seemed fairly straight forward. I'm not a fan of PEAR so I tried the manual install instructions, which didn't work at all, after much frustration, I gave the PEAR method a go, which after appearing to do lots of things, also didn't work. I found a couple of articles online regarding the problems installing on Windows, but they didn't cover everything, so I thought (and because Richard Thompson asked me to, so he had a reference for installing it at home!) I'd blog the exact instructions of what to do.

PHPUnit

The first thing is to download and extract PHPUnit, download the file, unzip it and place the resulting folder in

C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.2.9-2\ 

(I renamed the folder from PHPUnit-3.5.4 to phpunit but its up to you. You can also put the folder anywhere you want, so long as you amend the include path instruction below).

PHP.ini

With the PHPUnit files extracted, we need to alter our php.ini file to have an include path of our PHPUnit directory, add the following line to the appropriate section of the php.ini file.

include_path = "C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.2.9-2\phpunit"

Dependancies

Because I didn't/couldn't/wouldn't install this through PEAR, there were quite alot of dependancies missing, which was frustrating considering the manual installation instructions didn't mention this. I also found, that these dependancies had to be extracted to the (root) phpunit folder, and not the PHPUnit folder within there (which is where I'd initially put them - to a further series of errors!). Download the following dependancies, and extract them to the root phpunit folder (i.e. C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.2.9-2\phpunit).

• PHP/CodeCoverage (copy the PHP folder and its contents)
• PHP/Timer (copy the PHP folder and its contents (don't override the PHP folder from the previous dependancy))
• PHP/TokenStream (copy the PHP folder and its contents (don't override the PHP folder from the previous dependancies))
• Text/Template (copy the Text folder and its contents)
• File/Iterator (copy the File folder and its contents)

The bat (cave) file

Since we are running on Windows, to run PHPUnit, we can't simply rename phpunit.php to phpunit and run it (as per the instructions), we instead run the phpunit.bat file. The bat file in turn runs the PHP executable, and opens the phpunit.php file with it.

Open the phpunit.bat file, and replace its contents with the following (replacing paths to php.exe and phpunit.php with your own systems paths).

C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.2.9-2\php.exe -d safe_mode=Off "C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.2.9-2\phpunit\phpunit.php" %*

phpunit.php

Within the phpunit.php file you need to replace @php_bim@ with the path to your php directory (as per the documentation)

C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.2.9-2

Running PHPUnit

Now simply open the command prompt, browse to your phpunit folder, and run phpunit followed by the file path of your tests.

Alternatives

If you know of alternative or better ways to install it, I'd love to hear them. I have a feeling that my aversion to PEAR (aside from the fact I couldn't get it working that way anyway!) made things more complicated.

Posted by Michael on 23rd Nov 2010 at 01:01