Moin Moin,
I am a bad programmer! This is the conclusion after reading the first lines of Sebastian Bergmanns manual for PHPUnit.
"Even good programmers make mistakes. The difference between a good programmer and a bad programmer is that the good programmer uses tests to detect his mistakes as soon as possible. The sooner you test for a mistake the greater your chance of finding it and the less it will cost to find and fix."
Ok - I will take my first words not too serious but I have to admit, that I do not develop test driven. The reason for that is the fact, that I never had an idea how to do it. I bought Sebastian Bergmanns "quick and dirty" PHPUnit book some years ago but did not tune in to it any further. Another reason ist the fact, that eUNIQUE for example was started without any testing. Drilling tests afterwards into was expected too expensive.
Since I have an account at github and are following some folks programming in Python or Ruby I recognized, that no software is going over the wire without tests. Which is a good thing in my opinion. Realizing that we have some really stupid bugs in our software (and also in other projects of mine) opened the disussion about using tests again - at least in my mind. But mentioning, using tests would definitely be a good idea was thrown to ground with the answer: there’s no time to do that. I don’t believe in that. I think the opposite is the truth. Thanks to a tweet from Stefan Bergmann, that the PHPUnit Manual has a new CSS style, I started to read it. I will drop my experiences here in the next few posts because now I will start using tests!
Installing PHPUnit
You know that I am using an Debian based system. So sorry to all the other geeks out there when I just explain stuff based on this OS. It shouldn’t be a big thing to adapt this to other OS.
PHPUnit is delivered by PEAR. I was running in a small issue when trying to install PHPUnit like explained in the manual. The reason was the wrong PEAR Installer. Fix it like this:
If you never used PEAR or it might be old, simply reinstall it (just to be save):
$ sudo aptitude reinstall php-pear
Next step is to add the channel for PHPUnit
$ sudo pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de Adding Channel "pear.phpunit.de" succeeded Discovery of channel "pear.phpunit.de" succeeded
Good - now we try to install PHPUnit (output shortened):
$ sudo pear install phpunit/PHPUnit ... phpunit/PHPUnit requires PEAR Installer (version >= 1.8.1), installed version is 1.7.1 ... No valid packages found install failed
Ok - this did not work. So we have to update the PEAR installer. Checking out the PEAR page helps. Follow these steps (shortened):
$ sudo pear upgrade --force http://pear.php.net/get/PEAR-1.4.3.tar downloading PEAR-1.4.3.tar ... Starting to download PEAR-1.4.3.tar (Unknown size) .............done: 1,745,408 bytes WARNING: channel "pear.php.net" has updated its protocols, use "channel-update pear.php.net" to update ... downloading Archive_Tar-1.3.3.tgz ... Starting to download Archive_Tar-1.3.3.tgz (18,119 bytes) ...done: 18,119 bytes upgrade ok: channel://pear.php.net/Archive_Tar-1.3.3 upgrade ok: channel://pear.php.net/PEAR-1.4.3 ...
Ok - now we follow the instructions of upgrading the protocol:
$ sudo pear channel-update pear.php.net Retrieving channel.xml from remote server Update of Channel "pear.php.net" succeeded
Then we upgrade PEAR (output shortened):
$ sudo pear upgrade PEAR downloading PEAR-1.8.1.tgz ... Starting to download PEAR-1.8.1.tgz (290,382 bytes) ........................................done: 290,382 bytes downloading XML_Util-1.2.1.tgz ... Starting to download XML_Util-1.2.1.tgz (17,729 bytes) ...done: 17,729 bytes upgrade ok: channel://pear.php.net/XML_Util-1.2.1 upgrade ok: channel://pear.php.net/PEAR-1.8.1
And finally we install PHPUnit (shortened):
$ sudo pear install phpunit/PHPUnit downloading PHPUnit-3.3.17.tgz ... Starting to download PHPUnit-3.3.17.tgz (272,418 bytes) ..........................................done: 272,418 bytes install ok: channel://pear.phpunit.de/PHPUnit-3.3.17
Tata … that’s it. If you want, you can install the optional packages. If want to install all the dependencies add the option —alldeps to the install command. The output will be like this (quite long - sorry):
$ sudo pear install --alldeps phpunit/PHPUnit WARNING: "pear/DB" is deprecated in favor of "pear/MDB2" phpunit/PHPUnit can optionally use PHP extension "pdo_sqlite" phpunit/PHPUnit can optionally use PHP extension "xdebug" (version >= 2.0.0) pear/Log can optionally use PHP extension "sqlite" downloading PHPUnit-3.3.17.tgz ... Starting to download PHPUnit-3.3.17.tgz (272,418 bytes) ........................................done: 272,418 bytes downloading Image_GraphViz-1.2.1.tgz ... Starting to download Image_GraphViz-1.2.1.tgz (4,872 bytes) ...done: 4,872 bytes downloading Log-1.11.4.tgz ... Starting to download Log-1.11.4.tgz (44,275 bytes) ...done: 44,275 bytes downloading DB-1.7.13.tgz ... Starting to download DB-1.7.13.tgz (132,246 bytes) ...done: 132,246 bytes downloading MDB2-2.4.1.tgz ... Starting to download MDB2-2.4.1.tgz (119,790 bytes) ...done: 119,790 bytes downloading Mail-1.1.14.tgz ... Starting to download Mail-1.1.14.tgz (17,537 bytes) ...done: 17,537 bytes downloading Net_SMTP-1.3.2.tgz ... Starting to download Net_SMTP-1.3.2.tgz (10,247 bytes) ...done: 10,247 bytes downloading Auth_SASL-1.0.2.tgz ... Starting to download Auth_SASL-1.0.2.tgz (5,645 bytes) ...done: 5,645 bytes install ok: channel://pear.phpunit.de/PHPUnit-3.3.17 install ok: channel://pear.php.net/Image_GraphViz-1.2.1 install ok: channel://pear.php.net/Log-1.11.4 install ok: channel://pear.php.net/DB-1.7.13 install ok: channel://pear.php.net/MDB2-2.4.1 install ok: channel://pear.php.net/Mail-1.1.14 install ok: channel://pear.php.net/Net_SMTP-1.3.2 install ok: channel://pear.php.net/Auth_SASL-1.0.2 MDB2: Optional feature fbsql available (Frontbase SQL driver for MDB2) MDB2: Optional feature ibase available (Interbase/Firebird driver for MDB2) MDB2: Optional feature mysql available (MySQL driver for MDB2) MDB2: Optional feature mysqli available (MySQLi driver for MDB2) MDB2: Optional feature mssql available (MS SQL Server driver for MDB2) MDB2: Optional feature oci8 available (Oracle driver for MDB2) MDB2: Optional feature pgsql available (PostgreSQL driver for MDB2) MDB2: Optional feature querysim available (Querysim driver for MDB2) MDB2: Optional feature sqlite available (SQLite2 driver for MDB2) MDB2: To install optional features use "pear install pear/MDB2#featurename"
As you can see it’s quiet simple to install PHPUnit. The last step is to check wheter everything is good or not by writing a simple test (taken from the manual). Create a new file named StackTest.php and write the following into it:
<?php require_once 'PHPUnit/Framework.php';
class StackTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase {
public function testPushAndPop() {
$stack = array();
$this->assertEquals(0, count($stack));
array_push($stack, 'foo');
$this->assertEquals('foo', $stack[count($stack)-1]);
$this->assertEquals(1, count($stack));
$this->assertEquals('foo', array_pop($stack));
$this->assertEquals(0, count($stack));
}
}
?>
Now let’s see if we can use PHPUnit:
$ phpunit --verbose StackTest PHPUnit 3.3.17 by Sebastian Bergmann. StackTest . Time: 0 seconds OK (1 test, 5 assertions)
If you see this result, everything works.
That’s it for this time. In the next posts I will write about the integration of unit tests in our software - but don’t ask me when ;-). Please go and read the manual for PHPUnit in the meantime. Thanks to Sebastian Bergman!
Andy