PHPUnit is the de-facto standard for unit testing in PHP projects. It provides both a framework that makes the writing of tests easy as well as the functionality to easily run the tests and analyse their results.

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. Furthermore, components that PHPUnit depends upon are hosted on additional PEAR channels.

pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
pear channel-discover components.ez.no
pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com

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.

The documentation for PHPUnit is available in different formats:

• English, multiple HTML files
• English, single HTML file
• English, PDF
• English, ePub
• Japanese, multiple HTML files
• Japanese, single HTML file
• Japanese, PDF
• Japanese, ePub

• Send an email to [email protected] to subscribe to the phpunit-user mailing list. This is a medium volume list for general PHPUnit support; ask PHPUnit questions here.
• Send an email to [email protected] to subscribe to the phpunit-dev mailing list. This is a low volume list for those who want to help out with the development of PHPUnit.

The #phpunit channel on the Freenode IRC network is a place to chat about PHPUnit.

The following commands can be used to perform the initial checkout of PHPUnit and its dependencies from Git:

mkdir phpunit && cd phpunit
git clone git://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit.git
git clone git://github.com/sebastianbergmann/dbunit.git
git clone git://github.com/sebastianbergmann/php-file-iterator.git
git clone git://github.com/sebastianbergmann/php-text-template.git
git clone git://github.com/sebastianbergmann/php-code-coverage.git
git clone git://github.com/sebastianbergmann/php-token-stream.git
git clone git://github.com/sebastianbergmann/php-timer.git
git clone git://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit-mock-objects.git
git clone git://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit-selenium.git

The dbunit, php-code-coverage, php-file-iterator, php-text-template, php-timer, php-token-stream, phpunit, phpunit-mock-objects, and phpunit-selenium directories need to be added to the include_path.

The phpunit/phpunit.php script can be used to invoke the PHPUnit test runner.

The following commands can be used to check out the appropriate branches for PHPUnit 3.5:

cd phpunit && git checkout 3.5 && cd ..
cd dbunit && git checkout 1.0 && cd ..
cd php-file-iterator && git checkout 1.2 && cd ..
cd php-code-coverage && git checkout 1.0 && cd ..
cd php-token-stream && git checkout 1.0 && cd ..
cd phpunit-mock-objects && git checkout 1.0 && cd ..
cd phpunit-selenium && git checkout 1.0 && cd ..

The following commands can be used to check out the appropriate branches for PHPUnit 3.6:

cd phpunit && git checkout master && cd ..
cd dbunit && git checkout master && cd ..
cd php-file-iterator && git checkout master && cd ..
cd php-code-coverage && git checkout master && cd ..
cd php-token-stream && git checkout master && cd ..
cd phpunit-mock-objects && git checkout master && cd ..
cd phpunit-selenium && git checkout master && cd ..