PHPUnit testing support in Moodle

Documentation

Composer installation

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

install Composer - http://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md
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.

install PEAR package manager - see PEAR Manual
install PHPUnit package and phpunit/DbUnit extension - see PHPUnit installation documentation
edit main config.php - add $CFG->phpunit_prefix and $CFG->phpunit_dataroot - see config-dist.php
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?

create tests directory in your plugin
add local/mytest/tests/my_test.php file with local_my_testcase class that extends basic_testcase or advanced_testcase
add some test_*() methods
execute your new test case phpunit local_my_testcase local/mytest/tests/my_test.php
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?

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