Guard-phpunit allows you to automatically run PHPUnit tests when sources are modified. It helps with integrating test-driven development (TDD) into your development process: Just launch guard-phpunit before you start working and it will notify you about the status of your tests!

Note: Although guard-phpunit should work with any PHP version PHPUnit supports, it has only been tested on PHP 5.3.8 and 5.4.4.

Please be sure to have PHP, PHPUnit and Ruby installed on your machine before you proceed with the installation.

The latest versions of Ruby come with a packages-manager called gem. gem can be used to install various packages, including guard-phpunit.

To install guard-phpunit, run the following command in the terminal:

$ gem install guard-phpunit

Please read the Guard usage documentation.

Guard-phpunit can be used with any kind of PHP projects that uses PHPUnit as its testing framwork. Please read the Guard documentation for more information about the Guardfile DSL.

By default, guard-phpunit will use the current working directory (pwd) to search for tests and run them on start (if you enabled the :all_on_start option).

The PHPUnit documentaion uses the Object Freezer library as an example on how to organize tests. This project uses the Tests directory for its tests.

An example of the Guardfile for the same project would look something like:

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

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

The following options can be passed to Guard::PHPUnit:

:all_on_start => false        # Run all tests on startup.
                              # default: true

:all_after_pass => false      # Run all tests after changed tests pass. This ensures
                              # that the process of making changed tests pass didn't
                              # break something else.
                              # default: true

:keep_failed => false         # Remember failed tests and keep running them with
                              # each change until they pass.
                              # default: true

:tests_path => 'tests'        # Relative path to the tests directory. This path
                              # is used when running all the tests.
                              # default: the current working directory (pwd)

:cli => '--colors'            # The options passed to the phpunit command
                              # when running the tests.
                              # default: nil

• Source hosted at GitHub
• Report issues/Questions/Feature requests on GitHub Issues

Pull requests are very welcome! Make sure your patches are well tested. Please create a topic branch for every separate change you make.

Maher Sallam