Graham Christensen

Testing Symfony and Propel With PHPUnit

Running PHPUnit alongside of symfony is a fairly easy matter. Including the ProjectConfiguration file initializes the autoloader, your libraries get set up, everything is gravy… Except when its not.

When you get into contexts, configurations, applications, database integration, or nearly anything else that touches even the basic symfony bits, you drag in the whole symfony stack. Something in the stack caused every test to throw an unintelligible RuntimeException, with thousands of literal question marks (read: not an encoding error.)

Even through modifying symfony and PHPUnit’s sourcecode, running XDebug, not running XDebug, etc. nothing could convert those question marks into real-life, intelligible errors. Imagine how silly I felt searching Google for ”phpunit symfony question marks” - nothing, as you could imagine, came up.

I had worked through both of the existing Symfony plugins, sfPHPUnitPlugin and sfPHPUnit2Plugin. One of the is very over-arching and depends on an old version of PHPUnit (however it did work) and the newer one gave me the same issue.

After a long time of organized debugging, I devolved (as one usually does) to a series of shotgun debugging.

How I Solved It

Firstly, you’re going to need to use a bootstrap file to initialize the context. Basic, cut and dry:

<?php
$path = realpath(dirname(__FILE__) . '/../config/');
require_once $path . '/ProjectConfiguration.class.php';

// Initialize the application
$m = ProjectConfiguration::getApplicationConfiguration('frontend',
                                                       'testing', true);

// Now initialize the database bits
sfContext::createInstance($m);
new sfDatabaseManager($m);

error_reporting(E_ALL | E_STRICT);
ini_set('display_errors', true);
?>

Drop this into test/bootstrap.php. Every time you run phpunit from here, you pass the --bootstrap test/bootstrap.php

<phpunit
    colors="true"
    verbose="true"
    convertErrorsToExceptions="true"
    convertNoticesToExceptions="true"
    convertWarningsToExceptions="true"
    stopOnFailure="true"
    processIsolation="false"
    syntaxCheck="true"
    bootstrap="test/bootstrap.php">

    <testsuites>
        <testsuite name="Unit Tests">
            <directory>test/unit/</directory>
        </testsuite>
    </testsuites>

    <filter>
        <blacklist>
            <directory suffix=".php">lib/vendor</directory>
            <directory suffix=".php">cache</directory>
            <exclude>
                <directory suffix=".php">lib/vendor</directory>
            </exclude>
        </blacklist>
    </filter>
</phpunit>

Typing in phpunit --bootstrap test/bootstrap.php is pretty ridiculous, so drop this XML into phpunit.xml.

That phpunit.xml will make it pretty and ensure to exclude the extraneous files which you don’t want included in any coverage data. It will also specify the bootstrap.php which you just created. At this stage you just execute phpunit and all should be well.

For the record, I never did discover the cause of the question marks. I did, discover, however, that the trick is to enable process isolation.