PHPUnit ignores Apache environment variables

Question

I'm using Codeception, which leverages PHPUnit as its unit testing framework, and have a number of unit tests

I recently updated my database connection using connection info stored in the php configuration file (rather than hard-coded).

$host = getenv('RDS_HOST');
$user = getenv('RDS_USER');
$password = getenv('RDS_PASSWORD');
$schema = getenv('RDS_SCHEMA');

$mysqli = new \mysqli($host, $user, $password, $schema);

My app works just fine after these changes.

Problem is, many of my unit tests are now broken, running unit tests results in the error message:

[PHPUnit_Framework_Exception] mysqli::mysqli(): (HY000/2002): No such file or directory

I created unit tests just to see if PHPUnit will read my environment variables. It appears that it does not. It seems that PHPUnit is ignoring my environment variables.

How can I get PHPUnit/Codeception to recognize and use Apache environment variables?

Answer 1

PHPUnit is run via the cli, the web application is run via apache, which is why one works and the other doesn't.

For example, if you're running your tests on a Linux system from the command line you could export environment variables.

$ export RDS_HOST=host; export RDS_USER=user; and so on... vendor/bin/phpunit 

Those environment variables will then be available in php via getenv. Whereas in apache, for example, you might set them in a vitual host, so that when apache runs, those environment variables are available to PHP.

There are so many ways handle this, I don't know of any definitive solution. It depends on the application scope and its needs. vlucas/phpdotenv is the only package I can think of off the top of head that I think helps solves this problem for some use-cases.

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