Chapter 1. Installing PHPUnit

PHPUnit 4.2 requires PHP 5.3.3; using the latest version of PHP is highly recommended.

PHPUnit requires the dom, json, pcre, reflection, and spl extensions. These extensions are usually compiled and enabled by default. Some of them cannot even be disabled and are therefore always available.

For code coverage support, Xdebug 2.1.3 is required; using the latest version of Xdebug is highly recommended. The tokenizer extension is also required for the code coverage functionality to work. The xmlwriter extension is required to log code coverage information as XML.

The phar extension is required for using PHPUnit from a PHP Archive (PHAR). The openssl extension is required for the --self-update functionality of PHPUnit's PHAR to work. You need to configure suhosin.executor.include.whitelist = phar if you are using the Suhosin extension and would like to use PHPUnit from a PHP Archive (PHAR).

The easiest way to obtain PHPUnit is to download a PHP Archive (PHAR) that has all required (as well as some optional) dependencies of PHPUnit bundled in a single file:

wget https://phar.phpunit.de/phpunit.phar
chmod +x phpunit.phar
mv phpunit.phar /usr/local/bin/phpunit

You can also immediately use the PHAR after you have downloaded it, of course:

wget https://phar.phpunit.de/phpunit.phar
php phpunit.phar

Simply add a dependency on phpunit/phpunit to your project's composer.json file if you use Composer to manage the dependencies of your project. Here is a minimal example of a composer.json file that just defines a development-time dependency on PHPUnit 4.2:

{
    "require-dev": {
        "phpunit/phpunit": "4.2.*"
    }
}

For a system-wide installation via Composer, you can run:

composer global require "phpunit/phpunit=4.2.*"

Make sure you have ~/.composer/vendor/bin/ in your path.

The following optional packages are available: