Unit Testing TYPO3

First steps

1. Install the extension phpunit from TER. Alternatively you can also use git to checkout the latest version of phpunit.
2. Create a backend user name cli_phpunit to allow running task from shell.

On top of that, some systems require special PHP extensions, like xdebug which is required to generate the code coverage report.

On rpm based systems, like Fedora and RHEL, you need the packages php-process and php-posix in addition to the normal list of PHP extensions.

Integrating phpunit into your IDE

There are several IDE which can run phpunit test. Unfortunately this does not work that easy on TYPO3, because most TYPO3 functions required a fully bootstrapped framework to function. This requires to pull up TYPO3 prior to running any tests. This task is done by the extension phpunit, thus all request must be routed trough the phpunit e.g. via the cli interface.

./typo3/cli_dispatch.phpsh phpunit

• PhpStorm
• your IDE

Hints

• If using data providers, any code in the providers should be avoided. Especially time calculations are not a good idea, if tests are grunalar to seconds or minutes. Reason for that is, that all data provider data is calculated at the very befinning of a whole run. So, if you run 4000 tests in 2 minutes, there will be time offsets. See for example issue http://forge.typo3.org/issues/40515 on that. Furthermore, if additional initialization is done in setUp(), they won't hit depending calculations in dataProviders. If for example a dataProvider uses strtotime() and setUp() sets a specific timezone, the strtotime() will be executed *before* setUp() is called, and thus not take the different timezone setting of setUp() into account.