Phly, boy, phly
the weblog and site of Matthew Weier O'Phinney

I've been playing with PHPUnit a lot of late, particularly with framework development. One thing that's always hard to determine is how well your code is exercised -- basically, how much of the code is tested in the unit tests?

In PHPUnit 3, you can now generate code coverage reports using XDebug, and the usage is very simple:

matthew@localhost:~/dev/zend/framework-svn/tests$ phpunit --report ~/tmp/report AllTests

The above command creates a coverage report directory 'report' under my tmp directory. You can then browse through the reports in a web browser and visually see which lines of code were executed during tests, and which were not, as well as a synopsis showing the percentage of coverage for any given file or directory -- useful stuff indeed!

So, what's the problem? Getting XDebug running.

The executive summary:

• Enable the extension using zend_extension = /full/path/to/xdebug.so, not as extension = xdebug.so, in your php.ini
• Use the setting xdebug.default_enable = Off in your php.ini.
• If compiling using pecl or pear, make sure it compiles against the correct PHP; if not, hand compile it using:

  $ /path/to/phpize
  $ ./configure --with-php-config=/path/to/php-config
  $ make
  $ make install
  

For the detailed narrative, read on.