Question

The bootstrap configuration options is commented out in the latest version of the phpunit.xml documentation:
http://www.phpunit.de/manual/current/en/appendixes.configuration.html

And indeed, it doesn’t seem to be reading it in my configuration file. Why is this? How do I configure phpunit 3.6 to automatically include a bootstrap file?

It seems to me like it is extremely useful to setup your project so PHPUnit would automatically provisioned with a bootstrap file without the person running PHPUnit having to be aware of it, so they could simply do:

> phpunit

rather than:

> phpunit --bootstrap [file]

Answer 1

In the configuration file for PHPUnit, in version 3.4 you could include a bootstrap file as follows:

<phpunit backupGlobals="false"
         backupStaticAttributes="true"
         bootstrap="/path/to/bootstrap.php"

http://www.phpunit.de/manual/3.4/en/appendixes.configuration.html

But as of 3.5 this options has been commented out, so you can no longer use it:

<phpunit backupGlobals="true"
         backupStaticAttributes="false"
         <!--bootstrap="/path/to/bootstrap.php"-->

http://www.phpunit.de/manual/3.5/en/appendixes.configuration.html

I can’t find any reference as to why this option has been disabled. I looked for release notes for PHPUnit 3.5 to see if they mentioned anything, but nothing I found mentioned bootstrap at all.

http://sebastian-bergmann.de/archives/897-PHPUnit-3.5.html

https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/blob/3.5/README.markdown

I would still welcome a comment from anyone who knows why this options has been removed.