Manual:PHP unit testing/Running the tests

First run
Make sure you have installed PHPUnit.

Unit tests are run from the command line as there is no graphical user interface as of January 2012. Although phpunit provide a bootstrapping facility, we use a wrapper script. It makes sure the MediaWiki framework is properly initialized using your LocalSettings.php file, then directly call PHPUnit API. Invoking phpunit as is will simply not work.

The wrapper script phpunit.php is located in the tests/phpunit directory and is invoked using the PHP interpreter:

$ cd tests/phpunit $ php phpunit.php

The wrapper script is itself a MediaWiki maintenance script, and will pass all arguments to PHPUnit. To get a list of possible arguments have a look at phpunit --help.

Using default test groups
To make it easier to newcomers, tests/phpunit in core has a makefile providing some sane targets that are easier to remember than some long shell commands. You will obviously need the make utility. The sub-group names may look obscure to you right now, we will describe them later on in the writing unit tests section.
 * Entering make target runs sub-groups of tests.
 * Entering make help prints the list of targets and their descriptions.
 * Groups to be tested can be specified using the  option,   to exclude groups from being tested, respectively. A list of groups is returned when running.

For instance, to run all tests that do not require a database connection, specify the make target databaseless:

As said above, a list of other targets is always available using the special help target (make help).

Running other sets of tests
Running group of tests might be long and tedious, specifically when you are only altering a very specific part of the MediaWiki codebase. For example, you might be implementing some IPv6 functionality in the includes/IP.php file. In the test suite, that file code is covered by includes/utils/IPTest.php which you can pass as an argument to our PHPUnit wrapper.

Running the individual tests from includes/utils/IPTest.php looks like:

To see the name of each running test, uses the Test Anything Protocol format available in PHPUnit using --tap:

This format is great to filter the output for non passing test. For example with the grep command:

phpunit also provide a kind of checklist that give out a great output for people not familiar with tests or shells: the testdox format:

An unchecked box ([ ]</tt>), means the test failed, such as the one named « RC ns filter association » above.

You can also run tests within a specific directory. For example, to run all of the language-related tests: php phpunit.php languages/

Running a particular sub-group
make list-groups prints the available test groups. To run a particular test group, pass it to phpunit, for example make phpunit FLAGS="--group Editing"