CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

There's no existing/concrete plan, although it's generally patch-welcome.

Background: Civi has embedded a full copy of phpunit in civicrm-packages. In the past, this was used to hack in some patches, but it makes upgrading hard/mysterious, and I don't really think it's worthwhile. During the 4.5 or 4.6 cycle, I spent a chunk of time getting tests to run on standalone phpunit instead of embedded phpunit -- but couldn't quite bring myself to pull the trigger, and there may be a few tests which don't pass in standalone.

Suggestion: Try running each of the test suites with phpunit standalone, e.g.

cd sites/all/modules/civicrm
phpunit tests/phpunit/Civi/
phpunit tests/phpunit/CRM/
phpunit tests/phpunit/api/v3/

If they do work, then try a newer version of phpunit standalone.

(Note: Civi depends on two phpunit plugins, "dbunit" and "phpunit-selenium". The way to load these depends on how phpunit is installed. It's possible to install phpunit via composer, apt-get, and/or phar, but I don't know details of every permutation. For a working example, see buildkit's composer.json.)

If the tests do work with the standalone version, then I'd vote for this arrangement:

• Buildkit should include a newer version of phpunit. (Update composer.json and composer.lock) This provides a common baseline for folks working with Civi.
• If a future developer wants to use a different version of phpunit, he can install it on his own and set the PATH accordingly.
• The file "tools/scripts/phpunit" should be replaced with a dummy bash script that just calls standalone phpunit.
• The wiki http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Testing should use standalone "phpunit" (instead of "cd scripts; ./tools/phpunit").
• Remove the embedded copy of phpunit from civicrm-packages.