How to configure PhpStorm to use symfony/phpunit-bridge

Question

I had problems with configuring PhpStorm IDE to use http://symfony.com/doc/current/components/phpunit_bridge.html while working with Symfony 3.3.

I decided to just download phpunit.phar to bin and use it instead.

Symfony 3.4 (and Symfony 4), does not even have phpunit.xml.dist out of the box, so there is a problem with using phpunit.phar easily.

I've installed PHPUnit using flex:

composer req phpunit 

That created phpunit.xml.dist and I was able to run tests from command line by:

php bin/phpunit 

But again I could not make PhpStorm use it.

So I downloaded phpunit.phar and it can work together with provided phpunit.xml.dist.

Question 1: Is there any way for PhpStorm IDE to use phpunit-bridge?

Question 2: What is the best practice for Symfony 4 (phpunit-bridge or vanilla phpunit.phar)?

Answer 1

What I usually do is point my phpunit testing framework on PHPStorm to the secret .phpunit directory which was created by the bridge, like:

The location of the "phar" file is:

bin/.phpunit/phpunit-(major).(minor)/phpunit 

or in some cases:

vendor/bin/.phpunit/phpunit-(major).(minor)/phpunit 

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After this, the specified phpunit executable will be called correctly when exeuting unit-tests, but with a --no-configuration option. This can cause autoloading problems (a lot of "class not found" errors), because the autoloader generated by Composer is not specified anywhere.

To fix this, you should have a phpunit.xml file in your project (this is common practice anyway), in which you specify Composer's autoloader, something like this:

<phpunit bootstrap="vendor/autoload.php"> 

This phpunit.xml should then be specified in the "Default configuration file" option and you should be good to go.

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Regarding phpstorm using phpunit-bridge: It's possible as a custom script, but you won't have the nice interface and the possibility to run (and debug) specific tests via PHPStorm interface.