Why, Fatal error: Class 'PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase' not found in ...?

Question

For those arriving here after updating phpunit to version 6 or greater released on 2017-02-03 (e.g. with composer), you may be getting this error because phpunit code is now namespaced (check changelog).

You will need to refactor things like \PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase to \PHPUnit\Framework\TestCase

The PHPUnit documentation says used to say to include/require PHPUnit/Framework.php, as follows:

require_once ('PHPUnit/Framework/TestCase.php');

UPDATE

As of PHPUnit 3.5, there is a built-in autoloader class that will handle this for you:

require_once 'PHPUnit/Autoload.php';

Thanks to Phoenix for pointing this out!

For higher version of phpunit such as 6.4 You must use the namespace PHPUnit\Framework\TestCase

use TestCase instead PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase

// use the following namespace
use PHPUnit\Framework\TestCase;

// extend using TestCase instead PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
class SampleTest extends TestCase {

}

I was running PHPUnit tests on PHP5, and then, I needed to support PHP7 as well. This is what I did:

In composer.json:

"phpunit/phpunit": "~4.8|~5.7"

In my PHPUnit bootstrap file (in my case, /tests/bootstrap.php):

// PHPUnit 6 introduced a breaking change that
// removed PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase as a base class,
// and replaced it with \PHPUnit\Framework\TestCase
if (!class_exists('\PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase') && class_exists('\PHPUnit\Framework\TestCase'))
    class_alias('\PHPUnit\Framework\TestCase', '\PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase');

In other words, this will work for tests written originally for PHPUnit 4 or 5, but then needed to work on PHPUnit 6 as well.

You may get this error because you namespaced the file. If so you will need to specify that PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase is in the global namespace by preceding it with a backslash:

namespace AcmeInc\MyApplication\Tests
class StackTest extends \PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase {}

I submitted a crude PR to start conversation for correcting the documentation.

You can simply install PHPUnit to run commands (https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/#php-archive-phar):

wget https://phar.phpunit.de/phpunit.phar
chmod +x phpunit.phar
mv phpunit.phar /usr/local/bin/phpunit

Run single test

And then run PHPunit test:

phpunit test.php

Content of test file is following:

<?php

class StackTest extends PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase
{
    protected function setUp()
    {
    }

    public function testSave()
    {

    }
}

Run test suite

Configuration of test suite: demosuite.xml. demo is directory containing all tests. Test files must be named as *_test.php (suffix).

<testsuites>
    <testsuite name="DemoTestSuite">
        <directory suffix="test.php">demo</directory>
    </testsuite>
</testsuites>

Test suite runs with following commands:

phpunit -c demosuite.xml --testsuite DemoTestSuite