I wanted to add unit test support to a current Kohana 2.3.4 project I’m working on.  Unfortunately, most of the posts I found on how to integrate unit testing into Kohana were for version 3.x, not 2.3.x.  The few hits I did find for the 2.x branch had dead links, or weren’t entirely sufficient to get me to the point where I could run tests.  Luckily this wasn’t my first time using PHPUnit, so I went ahead and tried to see what it would take to get PHPUnit working directly w/out having to enlist Kohana’s unittest module.  Suprisingly, it was pretty straight forward.

The first thing  did was install PHPUnit (I’m working on Ubuntu, hence the use of apt-get):

sudo apt-get install phpunit

Second, I created the following 2 directories to house all the test related code:

• application/tests
• application/tests/classes

From here, the work begins.  You’ll need 3 more things to get to the point where you can write tests:

1. a phpunit.xml file
2. a simple php test file
3. a PHPUnit specific Bootstrap file

The phpunit.xml file is the config file for PHPUnit.  Create the file in the application/tests directory w/this content, be sure to add the path to your index.php file:

<!--?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?-->

./

Next, add a simple test file.  Create application/tests/classes/BaseTest.php w/the following content:

<?php

require_once 'PHPUnit/Framework.php';

class BaseTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
    public function testBase()
    {
        $this->assertTrue(true);
        $this->assertEquals(1, 1);
    }
}

That’s obviously not a worthy test for a real application, but it’ll serve as an indicator that the setup is correct when we try to run tests.

Next, cd to your application/tests directory and run phpunit.  You’ll probably get a bunch of HTML output, but at the very bottom you should see a message that reads: OK (1 test, 2 assertions). If so, then you’re ready to start adding your own tests.

Now, the 3rd item I listed above is to get rid of all the HTML output I just mentioned.  There are 2 reasons you’ll want to do this:

1. To rid of the output nuisance when running tests from the command line
2. To avoid problems when running unit tests from an IDE.  I was happy to find PHPUnit support in NetBeans, but while tests ran fine from the command line, running those tests from an IDE always returned the message No Tests Executed.  It wasn’t until I removed the HTML output that NetBeans was able to find my tests and parse the results.

So for item 3, we’ll need to do 3 things:

1. copy system/core/Bootstrap.php as application/tests/BootstrapPHPUnit.php.
2. comment out these 3 calls in that file:
   

   Event::run('system.routing');
   Benchmark::stop(SYSTEM_BENCHMARK.'_system_initialization');
   Event::run('system.execute');

3. In your index.php file, you’ll need to route to either the core Bootstrap file, or the PHPUnit specific Bootstrap file depending on whether PHPUnit is running your app vs. a real user.  For that, I replaced:

   require SYSPATH.'core/Bootstrap'.EXT;

   with…
   

   if(strpos($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'], 'phpunit') && empty($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']))
   {
       require APPPATH.'tests/BootstrapPHPUnit'.EXT;
   }
   else
   {
       require SYSPATH.'core/Bootstrap'.EXT;
   }

Once that’s done, you should be able to run phpunit again from the command line and not have to put up with the HTML output.