The latest version of PHPUnit (3.6.4 at the time of this writing) does not play well with the Zend Framework extensions (Zend_Test_PHPUnit). After asking Matthew Weier O’Phinney about this he answered that they had standardized on PHPUnit-3.4 for ZF1.

Having just upgraded to the latest version of PHPUnit on our servers we were no longer able to test our Zend Framework applications. One option was to downgrade PHPUnit, but since we were already using some of the new features this was not going to happen.

One solution to this problem is to run multiple versions of PHPUnit and use specific versions for specific test suites. Not optimal, but at least it gets the job done. (more…)

Using the memory/temporary stream provided by php:// stream wrapper you  can create a stream with read and write access directly to RAM or to a temporary file.

This gives you the possibilty to write unit tests that does not rely on a specific file, resource or stream, but rather on data provided by the test itself.

Creating a memory stream is easy; $fp = fopen('php://memory', 'r+');. Now you have a resource that can be used and manipulated just like any other stream or file.

This article is about how to mock the file system when writing unit tests, and it will be rather code-heavy. If you are not familiar with the concept of unit testing this article might not be the best place to start. There will be other articles regarding unit testing on this blog, so keep coming back for more. (more…)