composer test

Composer is a package manager for PHP which already serves ~34'000 packages (as of July, 22nd) via Packagist and grows with 70 new packages a day.

It is already used by the majority of open source PHP libraries, such as Symfony and ZendFramework.

However, when it comes to unit testing, most libraries demand you to have either PHPUnit or Behat installed globally.

A change to composer that was merged yesterday makes testing now as easy as running composer test.

The scripts field

The scripts field in the composer.json was reserved for certain events until now, such as pre-package-install or post-update-cmd which made it possible to hook into these events and run additional scripts.

Additionally to this you can now define your own custom scripts and run them with composer run-script or simply with composer run. Composer will also map the vendor/.bin to the $PATH meaning that you can define phpunit or your unit test framework of choice as a development dependency:

{
    "name": "example-app",
    "require-dev": {
        "phpunit/phpunit": "4.*"
    },
    "scripts": {
        "test": "phpunit -c app"
    }
}

Now you can simply run composer test.

Additional tasks

Instead of make or phing you can define additional tasks directly in your composer.json file now. So for example, if you need to provide a phar for your app you could have a composer.json that looks like this:

{
    "name": "example-app",
    "require-dev": {
        "kherge/box": "2.*"
    },
    "scripts": {
        "build": "box"
    }
}

Then you could package you app by running composer run-script build. This would work because the box dependency provides an executable in the vendor/.bin folder which is being mapped directly to the $PATH.