Using Guard + PHPUnit for Great Good!

Another day, another post about the tooling I’ve been using to make PHP development bearable. Today I’ll share guard-phpunit, which I discovered thanks to a tip by @ctshryock.

I’ve been using this as a replacement for watchr which I use to autorun tests whenever I make code changes. I’ve switched to guard for a number of reasons, chief amongst them being the awesome notification support. You can use growl, libnotify and rb-notifu to notify test pass/fail.

Here’s the Guardfile I’ve been using. This is tailored for Zend Framework 2 so that whenever I modify a php class under a module directory it will run the tests for that particular class. Rapid feedback for the win!

guard 'phpunit', :tests_path => 'test', :cli => '-c test/phpunit.xml' do
  # Watch tests files
  watch(%r{^.+Test\.php$})

  # Watch library files and run their tests
  watch(%r{^module/(.+)/src/.+/(.+)/(.+)\.php}) { |m| "test/#{m[1]}/#{m[2]}/#{m[3]}Test.php" }
end