Test::Simple for PHP

• Thu, 26 Jan 2006 at 16:33:01 GMT
• 6 Comments
• References

Via PHPDeveloper.org, I just read a post on PhpGirl that discusses a familiar topic, testing:

I'll write a Test::Simple for PHP. Yes, I know there exists one already that uses the power of Perl to test PHP files, but I didn't have time to figure out how to set that up and probably won't be able to use Perl anyways on the production system.

A few years ago, Geoff Young and I gave a talk called Testing PHP with Perl. We thought we were being funny (in our defense, those who listened to the talk seemed to agree), but I think all we did is make our project seem inaccessible to PHP developers. Perl is scary. :-)

Part of our project is a pure PHP implementation of Test::More called test-more.php. If you want to really keep things dirt simple (which seems to be Nola's goal), you can use it by itself with no framework, but more on that in a minute.

In a follow-up post, Nola describes how she uses her simple testing library. The first argument to ok() is a boolean that indicates whether the test passes. She demonstrates some tests using conditionals that compare two values expected to be equal:

<?php 
 
$t->ok($user->getRealName() == 'John Doe Test', 'get RealName'); 
$t->ok($user->getUserName() == 'jdoe', 'get UserName'); 
$t->ok($user->getEmail() == 'john@doe.com', 'get Email'); 
$t->ok($user->getPermission() == 1, 'get Permission'); 
 
?>

She also demonstrates some tests using conditionals that compare two values expected to not be equal:

<?php 
 
$t->ok($user->getRealName() != 'Susie Doe', 'Not Realname Suzie Doe'); 
$t->ok($user->getUserName() != 'sdoe', 'Not Username sdoe'); 
$t->ok($user->getEmail() != 'suz@doe.com', 'Not email suz@doe.com'); 
$t->ok($user->getPermission() != 0, 'Not Permission 0'); 
 
?>

You can do the same sort of thing with test-more.php:

<?php 
 
include './test-more.php'; 
include './user-class.php'; 
 
plan(8); 
 
ok($user->getRealName() == 'John Doe Test', 'get RealName'); 
ok($user->getUserName() == 'jdoe', 'get UserName'); 
ok($user->getEmail() == 'john@doe.com', 'get Email'); 
ok($user->getPermission() == 1, 'get Permission'); 
 
ok($user->getRealName() != 'Susie Doe', 'Not Realname Suzie Doe'); 
ok($user->getUserName() != 'sdoe', 'Not Username sdoe'); 
ok($user->getEmail() != 'suz@doe.com', 'Not email suz@doe.com'); 
ok($user->getPermission() != 0, 'Not Permission 0'); 
 
?>

I created a simple user-class.php file to implement the methods she uses:

<?php 
 
class user 
{ 
    public function getRealName() { return 'John Doe Test'; } 
    public function getUserName() { return 'jdoe'; } 
    public function getEmail() { return 'john@doe.com'; } 
    public function getPermission() { return 1; } 
} 
 
$user = new user; 
 
?>

If you just run this PHP script, you'll see the raw TAP output:

1..8
ok 1 - get RealName
ok 2 - get UserName
ok 3 - get Email
ok 4 - get Permission
ok 5 - Not Realname Suzie Doe
ok 6 - Not Username sdoe
ok 7 - Not email suz@doe.com
ok 8 - Not Permission 0

If a test fails, the last line lets you know about it (in addition to one of those lines being not ok instead of ok):

# Looks like you failed 1 tests of 8.

So, even without a testing framework, you can use test-more.php as a simple testing facility. If you want to try it yourself, you can download Apache-Test (it's bundled with the distribution), look at the very bottom of TestConfigPHP.pm, or grab it from my code repository:

• http://shiflett.org/code/test-more.php

P.S. Using Test::Harness To Test PHP Applications, a talk being given at PHP Quebec, is supposed to cover this same topic. Hopefully Ken is keeping up with what's going on. If so, it should be a good talk. If not, it will be disappointing. :-)