Programming Tutorials

Install and use PHPUnit to test your PHP pages for errors.

By: Emiley J in PHP Tutorials on 2009-01-14  

Warning: require_once(PHPUnit/Framework.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory If you are getting this error, the most obvious reason is you do not have the PHPUnit installed in your web server. To install the PHPUnit in your server follow the steps below.

If you are wondering what is PHPUnit and why you need this then here is a brief introduction on PHPUnit.

PHPUnit is a set of tools to test your PHP pages for errors. Testing with PHPUnit is not a totally different activity from what you should already be doing. It is just a different way of doing it. The difference is between testing, that is, checking that your program behaves as expected, and performing a battery of tests, runnable code-fragments that automatically test the correctness of parts (units) of the software. These runnable code-fragments are called unit tests

PHPUnit should be installed using the PEAR Installer. This installer is the backbone of PEAR, which provides a distribution system for PHP packages, and is shipped with every release of PHP since version 4.3.0.

The PEAR channel (pear.phpunit.de) that is used to distribute PHPUnit needs to be registered with the local PEAR environment:

pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de

This has to be done only once. Now the PEAR Installer can be used to install packages from the PHPUnit channel:

pear install phpunit/PHPUnit

After the installation you can find the PHPUnit source files inside your local PEAR directory; the path is usually /usr/lib/php/PHPUnit.

Although using the PEAR Installer is the only supported way to install PHPUnit, you can install PHPUnit manually. For manual installation, do the following:

1. Download a release archive from http://pear.phpunit.de/get/ and extract it to a directory that is listed in the include_path of your php.ini configuration file.

2. Prepare the phpunit script:

   1. Rename the pear-phpunit script to phpunit.

   2. Replace the @php_bin@ string in it with the path to your PHP command-line interpreter (usually /usr/bin/php).

   3. Copy it to a directory that is in your PATH and make it executable (chmod +x phpunit).

3. Prepare the PHPUnit/Util/Fileloader.php script:

   1. Replace the @php_bin@ string in it with the path to your PHP command-line interpreter (usually /usr/bin/php).