Installing PHPUnit on Ubuntu Linux

To install PHPUnit, there are two direct dependencies which first need to be installed;

• PEAR
• Xdebug

As Xdebug also depends on PEAR, we’ll make sure that’s installed first.

Installing PEAR

My source-compiled version of PHP is installed at /usr/local/php, so we’ll first jump into that directory;

$ cd /usr/local/php

Now, following the instructions for Installing PEAR, I opted to download the installation script and run it locally;

$ wget -c http://pear.php.net/go-pear
$ ./bin/php go-pear

All the default settings should be fine, so go ahead and finish installing PEAR.

Installing Xdebug

As per the Installation Instructions, stay in the same directory and run the following;

./bin/pecl install xdebug

Again, follow the installation through to the end, and it should have installed the xdebug.so library into the libs/extensions directory. On my machine, it put it at /usr/local/php/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/xdebug.so (don’t ask me why…) Now, we have to add this module to PHP by editing the php.ini file. Fire up your favourite text editor, point it to /usr/local/php/lib/php.ini and add the following line;

zend_extension="/usr/local/php/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/xdebug.so"

Restart (or start) your server (I’m using apache installed at /usr/local/apache2, so I did $ /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl -k restart). Get a phpinfo() call, and you should have both “PEAR” and “Xdebug” listed on the page. So far, so good.

Installing PHPUnit

From PHPUnit’s manual, run the following commands;

$ ./bin/pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
$ ./bin/pear channel-discover components.ez.no
$ ./bin/pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com
$ ./bin/pear install phpunit/PHPUnit

For some reason this one took quite a while (1 minute) to begin, but once it did, it went quick and installed PHPUnit to /usr/local/php/PEAR/PHPUnit. Et voilà. Start writing tests for PHPUnit!

Jess Telford
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