Following through the examples in the "Agile Web Application Development with Yii 1.1 and PHP5" book

I just started reading the Agile Web Application Development with Yii 1.1 and PHP5 book. Chapter 3 explains the virtues of TDD (test-driven development) and tries to walk us through setting up a development environment that supports automated testing through PHPUnit and Selenium.

At the same time, right at the beginning of the chapter 2 there's this note:

"There are several versions of Yii from which to choose when downloading the framework. We will be using version 1.1.2 for the purposes of this book, which is the latest stable version as of the time of writing. Though most of the sample code should work with any 1.1.x version of Yii, there may be some subtle differences if you are using a different version. Please use 1.1.2 if you are following along with the examples."

This clearly makes sense - it's better to use the same version of the tools, as the author, if we're expecting to see the same results as shown in the book. The realty is that by the time some readers, like myself, get to read a book some of the software tools, and their dependencies, have evolved to the point where what they produce does not even remotely match what the version that the author used produced.

So I followed the advice, got Yii version 1.1.2, and I tried to follow along. It wasn't a smooth ride. I'll try to walk you through some of the pitfalls that I experienced, and the ways I overcame them, hopefully helping you if you're experiencing similar problems.

First problem appeared when I tried:

sudo pear install phpunit/PHPUnit 

shown on page 45

I got an error telling me that the version of pear I've been using was too old (had been using a MAMP setup common on Macs, which may have grown old, at version 1.*). Even though I don't have the exact message, based on my googling history it said something along these lines: "requires PEAR Installer (version >= 1.9.4)".

The solution for that was to upgrade pear, like so:

sudo pear upgrade pear

and do a
pear --version 
to check that the version went up.

However, if we follow what the book says, literally, when it tells us to install  phpunit/PHPUnit, like so:

sudo pear install phpunit/PHPUnit

we'll get the latest version of PHPUnit, which, of course, doesn't match the older version of the Yii framework, which we were advised to install. This opens a whole can of worms.

First off, when you try to run the functional test cases, by doing:
phpunit functional/SiteTest.php 
you'll be informed that:

PHP Warning:  require_once(PHPUnit/Extensions/SeleniumTestCase.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory

If you check the location of PHPUnit install, which on my system is at /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/PHPUnit, you'll see that indeed that file is missing. How so ? Turns out that most recent versions of PHPUnit and Selenium now get that file installed by doing:

sudo pear install phpunit/phpunit_selenium

but don't do that, because you'd just be wasting your time ! The thing is, you don't want to use the most recent PHPUnit, because if you do, as you would be if you followed the instructions in the book, you'll next hit this error:

Warning: require_once(PHPUnit/Framework.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in .../framework/test/CTestCase.php on line 11

Yeah, Yii version 1.1.2 requires PHPUnit/Framework.php, which is not present in the most recent versions of the PHPUnit.

So, "yes it is" - a complete mess, that is. To save your sanity, uninstall the newer versions of the tools:

sudo pear uninstall phpunit/PHPUnit_selenium (if you installed it already)
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/PHPUnit

Then install the version that matches the one used in the book:

sudo pear install --alldeps phpunit/PHPUnit-3.3.17

This should bring you to clear sailing through chapter 3.