Although I’ve been using NetBeans as an IDE for a couple of months now, I’ve just recently found out about the nifty PHPUnit integration that comes with it. Once you’ve told NetBeans where your tests are, where PHPUnit is and how PHPUnit should be called to run your tests, you can run the unittests and see the test results in the IDE!

Step 1: tell NetBeans where your tests are

Open the project preferences and enter the directory containing your unittests in the field ‘Test folder’.

If you did this right, you will notice that NetBeans doesn’t show this folder anymore in the projects tree, but instead it shows a separate tree: underneath the tree “Source files” there’s now also a tree called “Test files”:

Step 2: tell NetBeans where PHPUnit is

Go to Netbeans’ general preferences, open the tab ‘PHP, and then the tab ‘Unit Testing’. Here, enter the path to PHPUnit:

Step 3: tell NetBeans how to run the tests

Finally, we need to tell NetBeans how to run our tests. This can be done by pointing it to the phpunit.xml, in the Project Properties dialog (PHPUnit menu):

That’s it! You can now run your unittests using NetBeans!

Running unittests

In the ‘run’ menu a new option has appeared. Just underneath ‘Run Project’ option there’s a new option, ‘Test Project’. When you select this option NetBeans will run your unit tests and show the results:

As you can see something went wrong. It will not surprise you that clicking on the failed test will open the right unittest in your editor, showing you the line that failed so you can start figuring out what went wrong. The Test Results tab is sometimes a bit cryptic as to what went wrong, so it might help to open the Output dialog as well (menu Window -> Output -> Output), as the raw output of phpunit is captured here.

Code coverage

NetBeans can also capture the code coverage while you’re testing. To do this you first need to enable this by right-clicking the project and then selecting “Code Coverage” -> “Collect and Display Code Coverage”. Please note that you have to got the xdebug extension installed before you can do this, otherwise PHPUnit won’t run.

Once enabled you can run phpunit again just as you did earlier, but when it’s done running it will show in your source files which code was tested and which code was not, by marking it either green or red:

Upsides

There are probably a lot more things you can do with the NetBeans – PHPUnit integration. I haven’t got time yet to investigate everything that’s possible, but I think that this already is quite nifty. Opening my iTerm and typing ‘phpunit’ usually isn’t that much of a hassle, but generating, opening and browsing the code coverage HTML can sometimes be quite time consuming. Now, I can just press ^ F6 and the tests are run and the tested/untested lines are marked green and red in my editor. Great!

Downsides

There are downsides. First of all, you need to be able to run PHPUnit from the OS your IDE is on – so probably that means that you need to be running your webserver locally. Personally I like to run my webserver on a vmware image that represents the production environment, and I share the folder where my project is in using a hgfs mount. This means I couldn’t use PHPUnit that I installed on my vmware image, but I had to install it again on Mac OSX. This not only means extra work, but it also means the environment I’m running my tests on it not longer representative to the production environment.

Before updating your production environment, I think it’s a good idea to first run your tests once more on a more representative environment. Nevertheless the NetBeans – PHPUnit integration saves me quite some time when writing tests, because basically everything is happening in the same screen.