Wednesday, 21 February 2007

A GTK2 UI for PHPUnit

In a post over his blog, Tobias Schlitt, , informs you about the first running version of a GTK driven test runner for PHPUnit. He says the project is available through the PHPUnit SVN and is planned to be part of the PHPUnit release 3.2. He further informs you that it’s not in the absolute alpha stage and still misses a lot of features and might probably not run too stable on your system.

He says, the GUI allows you to load single or multiple PHPUnit tests suites starting with version 3.0 of PHPUnit, to run them and display their results. If you want to try it out, you can either check it out from the PHPUnit SVN or download a recent tarball, he informs.

He explains that to get the GTK UI running, you need a recent build of the PHP-GTK2 extension, PHP >= 5.1 and the provided ‘GtkUI/’ directory in your PHPUnit installation. If your include_path directive is set correctly, you only need to run the following code:

/your/path/to/PHPUnit/GtkUI/Main.php

He also shows how to set the UI running with the eZ Components test suites, for which you need to have the eZ Components autoload in place. If you need autoloading for your test suites, too, you can simply provide a PHP file containing your __autoload() function as a parameter to the main script. Later this will probably be configurable in the UI itself, but so far the following code will help, he says:

php /your/path/to/PHPUnit/GtkUI/Main.php /path/to/your/autoload.php