At my work PHPUnit is ‘just there’ but it’s not on my home machine where I’m running an out of the box XAMPP Lite setup. So I visited the PHPUnit installation manual and all looked easy:

pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
pear install phpunit/PHPUnit

But what I got was a message saying my pear installer was out of date, 1.7.1 was needed. Running ‘pear -V’ showed:

E:\Xampplite\php>pear -V
PEAR Version: 1.4.5
PHP Version: 5.2.5
Zend Engine Version: 2.2.0
Running on: Windows NT T1720 6.0 build 6000

Allright, upgrading PEAR it is. That was not as straightforward as hoped.

go-pear

I don’t know much about PEAR so I found a lot of possible solutions ranging from manually installing specific packages to something a bit more straightforward like ‘go-pear’. Better start simple so ‘go-pear’ it is. That started fine but ended up in a number of the following messages:

Warning: Cannot use a scalar value as an array in phar://go-pear.phar/PEAR/Comma
nd.php on line 268

After finding the right keywords to put into google I came on this page on PHPWomen.org. Spot on. After replacing go-pear.phar (rename the old one first, you never know) ‘go-pear’ at least stopped showing aforementioned errors but displayed some warnings (Commit Failed) that made me suspicious. And indeed, ‘pear -V’ still showed 1.4.5.

pear upgrade

Luckily I had quite some google tabs open allready so I proceeded with the next strategy:

E:\Xampplite\php>pear upgrade pear
downloading PEAR-1.8.1.tgz ...
Starting to download PEAR-1.8.1.tgz (290,382 bytes)
............................................................done: 290,382 bytes
downloading Archive_Tar-1.3.3.tgz ...
Starting to download Archive_Tar-1.3.3.tgz (18,119 bytes)
...done: 18,119 bytes
downloading Console_Getopt-1.2.3.tgz ...
Starting to download Console_Getopt-1.2.3.tgz (4,011 bytes)
...done: 4,011 bytes
upgrade ok: channel://pear.php.net/Archive_Tar-1.3.3
upgrade ok: channel://pear.php.net/Console_Getopt-1.2.3
Could not delete E:\Xampplite\php\pear.bat, cannot rename E:\Xampplite\php\.tmpp
ear.bat
ERROR: commit failed

Bummer. I tried renaming pear.bat but then the installer came with the same message for pear-dev.bat so I looked for a ‘real’ solution. Once again finding the right keywords (pear upgrade cannot delete windows) Google did the rest and yielded a page on pear-forum.org. I was one third on my way to the ‘real’ solution that is renaming the following files:

rename pear.bat _pear.bat
rename peardev.bat _peardev.bat
rename pecl.bat _pecl.bat

Followed by:

_pear upgrade pear

Resulting in:

E:\Xampplite\php>pear -V
PEAR Version: 1.8.1
PHP Version: 5.2.5
Zend Engine Version: 2.2.0
Running on: Windows NT T1720 6.0 build 6000

Victory

Retrying installing of PHPUnit now worked.

E:\Xampplite>phpunit --version
PHPUnit 3.3.16 by Sebastian Bergmann.

One final thing. It’s very convenient to add the php directory to environment path setting to allow for executing ‘php’ or ‘phpunit’ from whatever project directory. Do so by going to (on Vista, XP might differ):

Control Panel ->
System ->
Advanced system settings ->
(In the popup, bottom button) Environment Variables ->
(Lower list) Select path & choose 'edit'

Now add the php directory to the end of the line, in this case “;E:\Xampplite\php” (without the quotes). A restart might be needed.