PHPUnit testing support in Moodle

Documentation

• Moodle Dev wiki
• PHPUnit online documentation
• Composer dependency manager

Composer installation

Composer is a new dependency manager for PHP projects. It installs PHP libraries into /vendor/ subdirectory inside your moodle dirroot.

1. install Composer - http://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md
2. go to your moodle dirroot and execute php composer.phar install --dev

PEAR installation (not recommended)

PEAR is a framework and distribution system for reusable PHP components. The packages installed via PEAR are available in all PHP projects.

1. install PEAR package manager - see PEAR Manual
2. install PHPUnit package and phpunit/DbUnit extension - see PHPUnit installation documentation
3. edit main config.php - add $CFG->phpunit_prefix and $CFG->phpunit_dataroot - see config-dist.php
4. execute php admin/tool/phpunit/cli/init.php to initialise the test environment, repeat it after every upgrade or installation of plugins

Test execution

• execute vendor/bin/phpunit (or phpunit if you use PEAR) from dirroot directory
• you can execute a single test case class using class name followed by path to test file vendor/bin/phpunit core_phpunit_basic_testcase lib/tests/phpunit_test.php
• it is also possible to create custom configuration files in xml format and use vendor/bin/phpunit -c mytestsuites.xml

How to add more tests?

1. create tests directory in your plugin
2. add local/mytest/tests/my_test.php file with local_my_testcase class that extends basic_testcase or advanced_testcase
3. add some test_*() methods
4. execute your new test case phpunit local_my_testcase local/mytest/tests/my_test.php
5. execute php admin/tool/phpunit/cli/init.php to get the plugin tests included in main phpunit.xml configuration file

How to convert existing tests?

1. create new test file in xxx/tests/yyy_test.php
2. copy contents of the old test file
3. replace extends UnitTestCase with extends basic_testcase
4. fix setUp(), tearDown(), asserts, etc.