Before diving into how the parallel code works it is worth just covering how run-tests.php works – at a very simple level.
The easiest way to run a PHP test case is from the command line, like this:
The run-tests.php code parses the file “mytest.phpt”, finds the php code in the FILE section and runs it like this:
The run-tests.php code goes on to compare the output from the above with some expected test output. If they are the same the test passes, if not it fails.
As I said, this is a very simple example. The run-tests.php code can be thought of in three parts:
- The code required to set up the test environment and “php_options“
- Code that handles running tests.
- Retrieving, comparing and displaying output.
Over the next few posts I’ll work through each of these stages, explaining how they are handled by the new parallel run-tests code.