Question

I use PHPUnit for unit tests, but when a fatal error is triggered, the script dies and I have no correct PHPUnit output.

I’d like that the PHPUnit output stays correctly formated, because it is read by a plugin for Eclipse. Actually the fatal error stops PHPUnit and in Eclipse the plugin can’t interpret anything (because the PHPUnit script had an error, instead of handling it).

Thanks

Answer 1

You need to use PHPUnit’s process isolation features – start each test suite in a new process.

phpunit --process-isolation ...

This is the only way to make sure fatal errors don’t break your phpunit output.

Execution time

Process isolation multiplies your test run time, because for each single test, a new PHP instance is started, the bootstrap is executed etc.

To amend this situation, you may choose to run full test cases in a separate process (@runTestsInSeparateProcesses), or only single ones that are known to fatal out sometimes (@runInSeparateProcess).