Working with PHPUnit and CodeIgniter 1.7.2

Question

I recently started with the unit testing for my php website made in CodeIgniter 1.7.2. I want to test my web site using PHPUnit.

So I Googled it and came to know that there is a library for CodeIgniter & PHPUnit Bridge: http://www.foostack.com/foostack/ . I have followed all the steps, and got the code running, but when I execute a test case from console, my default controller is executed and the html for the page is printed on the console.

Can any one please tell me what exactly is happening or am I doing something wrong? Also if any one has any other ideas to test the model without using the foostack library please suggest it. Please let me know if any other details are required.

Thanks in Advance.

Answer 1

CodeIgniter is not an ideal framework where you can unit test your code with PHPUnit. I have myself tried using FooStack once and was successful then, but it is too cumbersome. There is no way of testing a model isolated in CI because of the god object CI makes.

You can however try SimpleTest, here is a good library that can help you with it: https://github.com/ericbarnes/codeigniter-simpletest

Other than that there is the Unit Test library provided with CI - which in nowhere near a full unit testing framework, but does let you do basic assertions, reporting etc.

If you're really serious about unit testing, I'd suggest you move to frameworks that value this. My favorite is Zend Framework, but there are other good ones as well: Symfony, Kohana, Lithium, etc.