I’ve been programming PHP now for, oh, almost a decade and I’ve been a contributor to PEAR for about four years now. It took me this long to finally get to the point that I think writing unit tests, in some form, is a good idea. I jumped on the OOP bandwagon about 6 years ago and drank the MVC koolaid about 4 years ago. As of a few weeks ago, I’ve jumped on the phpt bandwagon. I’m not going to cover the basics, because they’re well covered in a few different places around the web, but I am going to cover some of the nuances I’ve learned in the last few weeks.First off, you can run phpt files using the PEAR command line utility. I’ve been creating a tests directory and putting all of my phpt files in there. I normally name them 000-class-method.phpt and then increment the sequence number at the front for each test by 5 so I can do a decent job of predicting how tests run. Once you have a few tests you can run your tests in two different manners from the command line:

1. pear run-tests
2. pear run-tests 000-class-method.phpt

When you run your tests you’ll get results of which tests passed, which failed, if any of them were skipped and the reason why they were skipped, and files for debugging. If 000-class-method.phpt fails, there are a few files that will be of interest to you:

• 000-class-method.php is the actual PHP file ran, which is found in the --FILE-- portion of your phpt file.
• 000-class-method.outis what was actually output by the PHP file ran from the --FILE-- portion of your phpt file.
• 000-class-method.exp is what the test expected the output of 000-class-method.php to be, which is found in the --EXPECT-- portion of your phpt file.

You pretty much have everything you need to debug why a test failed. I normally diff the exp and out files and then debug the test (or my code, which is usually the case) using the php file.

Another great thing about phpt files is that you can use a cgi PHP binary to debug actual GET requests (phpt supports spoofing $_GET, $_POST and $_COOKIE using the cgi binary). This lets you create tests like the following:

--TEST--
Test a GET request
--GET--
foo=bar&baz=foo
--FILE--
<?php
echo $_GET['bar'] . "\n";
echo $_GET['baz'] . "\n";
?>
--EXPECT--
bar
foo


This test should pass without incident. The only catch is that you need to specify your cgi binary path using the --cgi argument when you run the tests (e.g. pear run-tests --cgi=/path/to/php-cgi).

Overall, I’m pretty happy with my newfound testing experiences. My only complaint is that phpt files don’t support spoofing of $_SESSION natively. A small complaint to be sure.