Category Archives: Development

Install PHPUnit with VisualPHPUnit on a Shared Hosting Server

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Update: The 4.x branch of PHPUnit has some changes, such as no longer using Autoload.php, that make this tutorial outdated. I’ll try to see if the new versions can be run on shared hosting as well, but in the meantime, the following instructions only apply for PHPUnit 3.x.

Here’s how to install and run PHPUnit with the VisualPHPUnit graphical interface, on any shared hosting server, without need for PEAR, composer, phar, or SSH command line; in fact all you need is your web browser, FTP access, and a code editor such as Notepad++.

PHPUnit: Dependency Madness

PHPUnit is the best case against the DRY philosophy I’ve ever came across, since it’s chock-full of random dependencies you won’t even be using for anything else. As such, be prepared to download and extract a helluva lot of packages.

First of all create a folder on your computer for housing all necessary files and directories, I’ve named mine Utilities for reference. Now go to https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/branches and check the requirements of every numbered version until you find the newest one that will run on the php version you’ve got on your server. If you don’t know which version of php you’re using, run phpinfo() to find out. Download the zip for your version, and extract just the PHPUnit folder inside into Utilities.

Go to https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/php-file-iterator, download the zip and extract just the File folder into Utilities.

Go to https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/php-text-template, download the zip and extract just the Text folder into Utilities.

For the next 3 packages, download the zip files and extract just the PHP folder in each zip into Utilities (merge the folders): https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/php-code-coverage
https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/php-timer
https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/php-token-stream

Now create a folder inside Utilities called SebastianBergmann . Now create 3 folders inside SebastianBergmann, called: Diff , Exporter , and Version . For the next 3 packages, download the zip files and extract just the contents of the src folder (not the folder itself, only its contents) in each one into the corresponding folder inside SebastianBergmann: https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/diff
https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/exporter
https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/version

Finally, go to https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit-mock-objects, download the zip and extract just the PHPUnit folder into Utilities (merge it with the existing folder).

Great, now that you’ve got PHPUnit and all its dependencies, upload the “Utilities” folder to your server, preferably into a non web-accesible location. For reference, your folder tree should look like this:

folder tree

VisualPHPUnit: Let there be GUI

Now that PHPUnit is on your server, let’s make it usable with a web browser based GUI. Download the zip from https://github.com/NSinopoli/VisualPHPUnit, extract it, and rename the main folder if you want (I creatively renamed mine to VisualPHPUnit for reference).

Go into app/config/bootstrap.php and make the following changes:

  • Comment or delete the following line: 'pear_path' => '/usr/share/pear',
  • The default directory for tests is VisualPHPUnit/app/test , if you wish to change it or add other directories, modify the ‘test_directories’ array. By the way, $root points to the VisualPHPUnit folder.
  • Comment or delete the following lines: set_include_path( get_include_path() . PATH_SEPARATOR . $root . PATH_SEPARATOR . $config['pear_path'] );
  • Below the lines you just commented, add the following two, changing the relative paths so that they point to your Utilities folder from the web-accessible folder where you’ll upload the VisualPHPUnit package: set_include_path(get_include_path() . PATH_SEPARATOR . dirname(__FILE__) . '/../Utilities'); set_include_path(get_include_path() . PATH_SEPARATOR . dirname(__FILE__) . '/../Utilities' . '/PHPUnit');

Now upload your VisualPHPUnit folder to a web-accessible location on your server. Fire up your browser, open your VisualPHPUnit location, and see if you feel lucky.

Well do you, punk?

If your stars have aligned now you should have a working install of PHPUnit with VisualPHPUnit. If not, it’s troubleshooting time!

“Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required ‘PHPUnit/Autoload.php'”

Your include paths in VisualPHPUnit/app/config/bootstrap.php are wrong, sort them out

“Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required {any other file related to phpunit}“

You missed a PHPUnit dependency, you can find all the packages you need (and then some more) at https://github.com/sebastianbergmann?tab=repositories

“404: Not Found” error / You just get the Index of your /VisualPHPUnit folder

You’ve got the curse of the .htaccess, brought on by lazy open-source web development practices. There are 2 .htaccess files in VisualPHPUnit that are used to redirect requests, and we need to fix them.

First open the .htaccess file in the “VisualPHPUnit” folder.

  • Find the following line:
    RewriteRule ^$ app/public/ [L] add an [R] flag so that you can see the redirected address in your browser, so the line becomes:
    RewriteRule ^$ app/public/ [L,R]
  • Go to your web browser, reload your VisualPHPUnit tab, and check the address to which you’re being redirected. It should be {your VisualPHPUnit location}/app/public/ . Since it’s not, find the following line in your .htaccess file:
    RewriteEngine on and insert the following line after it: RewriteBase /
  • Reload again your browser tab, and check where you’re being redirected now. Part of the path will probably be missing in the middle, so you’ll need to edit the line you just added so that your browser ends up redirecting you correctly to {your VisualPHPUnit location}/app/public/ . In my case I had to change it to this:
    RewriteBase /VisualPHPUnit/
  • Once you get redirected to the correct address, you need to remove the [R] flag you set at the beginning, so that the line you modified to
    RewriteRule ^$ app/public/ [L,R] becomes once again
    RewriteRule ^$ app/public/ [L]
Your browser should load VisualPHPUnit now, but tests will not work since we need to fix the remaining redirection. Go into VisualPHPUnit/app/public and open the .htaccess file there.
  • Find the following line:
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [QSA,L] and insert the [R] redirection flag as before, so the line becomes:
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [QSA,L,R]
  • Go to your browser and open the link on the top of your VisualPHPUnit tab that says “Archives”. Check the address bar to see where you are being redirected. You should be redirected to {your VisualPHPUnit location}/app/public/index.php . Since you’re not, you know the drill, find the following line in your .htaccess file:
    RewriteEngine on and insert the following line after it: RewriteBase /
  • Reload your browser tab, check where you’re being redirected and what’s missing in the path, and modify the line you just added until the redirection takes you to the correct address. In my case, I had to change it to this:
    RewriteBase /VisualPHPUnit/app/public/
  • Once you get redirected to the correct address, you need to remove the [R] flag you set, so that the line you modified to
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [QSA,L,R] becomes once again
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [QSA,L]
Now you should be able to see the files in your test directory and run tests.

Tests don’t run and return empty results

You’re using a PHPUnit version that requires a newer PHP version to run. Get an older version of PHPUnit.

“Fatal error: Uncaught exception ‘PHPUnit_Framework_Error_Notice’ with message ‘Non-static method PHP_Timer::start() should not be called statically, assuming $this from incompatible context'” when you try running tests

You’ve got the curse of the shitty non-backwards-compatible dependency refactoring, go into your Utilities folder and open PHPUnit/Framework/TestResult.php and make the following changes:

  • Find the following line:
    PHP_Timer::start(); comment it out or delete it, and insert the following 2 lines after it: $timer = new PHP_Timer; $timer->start();
  • Find the following line:
    $time = PHP_Timer::stop(); comment it out or delete it, and insert the following line after it: $time = $timer->stop();
Your tests should run fine now.

Sorting objects hierarchically in recursive multidimensional arrays in PHP

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When retrieving a group of objects from a database, sometimes we need to recreate some hierarchy inside a multidimensional array or object for further processing. However, since the language wasn’t developed with such usage scenarios in mind, the way to achieve this is anything but intuitive. Many developers just adjust their DB structure in order to make such sorting easier, but it’s always good to have a choice. I recently came across this problem myself, and think the solution I came up with is not only interesting, but could be useful to other developers out there. If you find this useful, or would like to propose a different solution, I’d love to read your comments below.

The Problem

Let’s say, as an example, that you have a DB table with columns id and parent, where id is an auto-generated primary key, and parent refers to id by a foreign key. The idea is every entry has either a parent in the same table, or a NULL parent and hence is at the top level of the hierarchy. We do not know how deep the hierarchy goes, and must be able to recursively populate a multidimensional array or object in order to recreate it.

The (Generic) Solution

First of all, we assume we are retrieving all entries into a plain array. We ORDER BY parent ASC, with NULLS first so we process the top level entries first. We will need to create 2 arrays, one for storing the entries hierarchically, and the other to keep track of the path of each entry inside the hierarchy. We will be dealing with arrays exclusively in this example, but using objects instead is pretty straightforward. 

$entries = yourGetEntriesFromDbFunction();  //The array with our retrieved DB entries
$entryRecords = array();                    //Our hierarchy will be created in this array
//We will track the path of each entry here, with an array
//for each entry containing the ids of all its ancestors:
$entryPaths = array();
foreach ($entries as $entry) {
    //Create a new key inside each entry to store its children:
    $entry['children'] = array();
    $entryPaths[$entry['id']] = array();    //Make a space for the path of the entry
    if ($entry['parent'] === NULL) {        //If top level, just insert into the hierarchy array
        $entryRecords[$entry['id']] = $entry;
    } else {
    	$pathRef =& $entryRecords;          //Save a reference to the top level of our hierarchy
        //Traverse our current hierarchy based on the path of the entry's parent by reassigning a
        //single variable by reference to the children container of each level in the hierarchy:
        foreach ($entryPaths[$entry['parent']] as $path) {
    		$pathRef =& $pathRef[$path]['children'];
    	}
        //Once we reach the entry's parent's children container, just add the entry to it:
        $pathRef[] = $entry;
        //Register the entry's path by first copying parent's path
        $entryPaths[$entry['id']] = $entryPaths[$entry['parent']];
    }
    $entryPaths[$entry['id']][] = $entry['id']; //Finally add the id of the entry to its path
}

As you can see, the main idea is to save the path of each entry we insert in order to know how to get to it, and then traverse the path of the parent by reassigning references to the children container of each post in the path. This way we can always reach the parent of a post inside our hierarchy, no matter how complicated, provided that all parents are inserted before their children into it.

Speak Yii to me

Actually, I came up with this algorithm while working with Active Records on Yii Framework, so might as well share the code that inspired this post. I have a Section Model, with id, parent, and order columns. id and parent are as in the above example, but the order column provides the order in which the children in a post should be sorted. I added a public property named “children” to the Model in order to be able to store a record’s children in it, but that’s all. Since it’s the same principle as above, it’s mostly uncommented: 

$sections = Section::model()->findAll(
    array('order'=>'parent ASC NULLS FIRST,"order"'));  //PostgreSQL FTW
$entryRecords = array();
$entryPaths = array();
foreach ($sections as $section) {
	$section->children = array();
    $entryPaths[$section->id] = array();
    if ($section->parent === NULL) {
        $entryRecords[$section->order] = $section;
    } else {
    	$pathRef =& $entryRecords;
        foreach ($entryPaths[$section->parent] as $path) {
    		$pathRef =& $pathRef[$path]->children;
    	}
        $pathRef[] = $section;
        $entryPaths[$section->id] = $entryPaths[$section->parent]; 
    }
    $entryPaths[$section->id][] = $section->order;
}

Hope you find some of this as useful as I did, and if you find this solution pretty obvious or even intuitive, congratulations: you’re a better web developer than I am.

Retrofitting jQuery prop() for when using both older and newer jQuery versions

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When upgrading your existing website to jQuery 1.6 or higher, you may have noticed that the attr() method stopped working like it has since time immemorial, breaking all previous code that used it. Supposedly jQuery 1.61 added some backwards compatibility fixes, but they don’t really work, at least for me. They say “just replace all attr() calls for prop() and be done”, however it’s not that simple if your code is supposed to work on different versions of jQuery, for example when developing extensions or modules for constantly updated frameworks, since prop() didn’t exist before jQuery 1.6. Actually, there is a simple way to make your code work on both older and newer jQuery versions. All you need to do is replace all attr() calls for prop() (it takes the same arguments so don’t worry), and add the following before your code: 

       if (typeof jQuery.fn.prop != 'function') {
            jQuery.fn.prop = jQuery.fn.attr;
        }

All this does is check if the prop() method exists, and if not, it creates it by cloning attr(). Hope this saves you some time.