Automatically rerun PHPUnit tests when source code changes

Wouldn't it be great if your PHPUnit tests would be automatically rerun whenever you change some code? This package can do exactly that.

With the package installed you can do this:

phpunit-watcher watch

Here's how it looks like:

This will run the tests and rerun them whenever a file in the app, src or tests directory is modified.

Want to pass some arguments to PHPUnit? No problem, just tack them on:

phpunit-watcher watch --filter=it_can_run_a_single_test

In his excellent talk at Laracon EU 2017 Amo Chohan shows our phpunit-watcher in action.

Installation

You can install this package globally like this

composer global require t73biz/phpunit-watcher

After that phpunit-watcher watch can be run in any directory on your system.

Alternatively you can install the package locally as a dev dependency in your project

composer require t73biz/phpunit-watcher --dev

Locally installed you can run it with vendor/bin/phpunit-watcher watch

Usage

All the examples assume you've installed the package globally. If you opted for the local installation prepend vendor/bin/ everywhere where phpunit-watcher is mentioned.

You can start the watcher with:

phpunit-watcher watch

This will run the tests and rerun them whenever a file in the src or tests directory is modified.

Want to pass some arguments to PHPUnit? No problem, just tack them on:

phpunit-watcher watch --filter=it_can_run_a_single_test

Notes on interactive commands

When running phpunit-watcher from a Composer script, you may need to redirect input in order for the interactive commands to work and disabled the default timeout:

{
    "scripts": {
        "test:watch": [
            "Composer\\Config::disableProcessTimeout",
            "phpunit-watcher watch < /dev/tty"
        ]
    }
}

On Windows, Currently, TTY is not being supported, so any interaction has been disabled. While watching for changes works, any arguments for PHPUnit have to be provided when initially calling phpunit-watcher.

Customization

Certain aspects of the behaviour of the tool can be modified. The file for options may be named .phpunit-watcher.yml, phpunit-watcher.yml or phpunit-watcher.yml.dist. The tool will look for a file in that order.

If a config file does not exist in the project directory, the tool will check if a file exists in any of the parent directories of the project directory.

Here's some example content. Read on for a more detailed explanation of all the options.

watch:
  directories:
    - src
    - tests
  fileMask: '*.php'
notifications:
  passingTests: false
  failingTests: false
phpunit:
  binaryPath: vendor/bin/phpunit
  arguments: '--stop-on-failure'
  timeout: 180

Customize watched directories and files

You can customize the directories being watched by creating a file named .phpunit-watcher.yml in your project directory. Here's some example content:

watch:
  directories:
    - src
    - tests
  exclude:
    - lib
  fileMask: '*.php'
  ignoreDotFiles: true
  ignoreVCS: true
  ignoreVCSIgnored: false

See the documentation for Finder for more details.

If you experience performance delays with large repositories, try adding exclude entries for any large subdirectories that you don't need to watch. Enabling the ignore... options can also be helpful. It's also important to ensure you're also using the '*.php' file mask.

Desktop notifications

By default the tool will display desktop notifications whenever the tests pass or fail. If you want to disable certain desktop notifications update .phpunit-watcher.yml by adding a notifications key.

notifications:
  passingTests: false
  failingTests: false

Help messages

By default the tool will display a helper for keyboard actions after each run. You can hide these help messages by adding a hideManual key in the .phpunit-watcher.yml.

hideManual: true

Customize PHPUnit

Binary

By default the tool use vendor/bin/phpunit as default PHPUnit binary file, however, it may be useful to be able to customize this value for people who have a binary file in a different location.

You can specificy it in the .phpunit-watcher.yml config file. Here's an example:

phpunit:
  binaryPath: ./vendor/phpunit/phpunit/phpunit

Initial arguments

If you want to use pass the same arguments to PHPUnit everytime to watcher starts, you can specify those in the .phpunit-watcher.yml config file. Here's an example:

phpunit:
  arguments: '--stop-on-failure'

When starting the tool with some arguments (eg phpunit-watcher watch --filter=my_favourite_test) those arguments will get used instead of the ones specified in the config file.

Changelog

Please see CHANGELOG for more information what has changed recently.

Testing

composer test

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

Credits

• Freek Van der Herten
• Ron Chaplin
• All Contributors

We started creating this package after reading this excellent article by Christoper Pitt

Interactive commands were inspired by Jest.

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.