Just so you know, I’ve rolled up what you said here and started to turn it into a bit of a quickstart Setup guide at http://github.com/NeilCrosby/frontend-test-suite/blob/master/SETUP.Markdown – hopefully that’ll make it a bit easier for new people to start using the project in the future.

The Suite looks awesome.

As my knowledge of PHP goes no further than messing with the Wordpress loop, it took me a little while to get the suite up and running on my machine as I wasn’t sure what did what.

I might be running it totally the wrong way, but here’s what I did, in my Idiot’s Guide to the Automated Frontend Testing Suite:

1) Install PHP if you don’t already have it.

I got the latest version from: http://uk2.php.net/get/php-5.2.9-2-Win32.zip/from/a/mirror

During the install, I chose ‘Do not setup a web server’. I then recommend installing the entire PHP feature, as some of the extensions and extras are required to get PEAR/PHPUnit going.

2) PEAR should have been installed with the package above. If not, you will nead to get it from http://pear.php.net/PEAR

3) To install PHPUnit, from the command line type

pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de

and then

pear install phpunit/PHPUnit

4) Download the test suite from http://github.com/NeilCrosby/frontend-test-suite/tree/master and extract

5) On lines 4 and 5 of suite/TheCodeTrainEasyFrontendTestSuite.php are two ‘require_once’ statements. I had to change these to point to the same files within my PHPUnit install location, so they now look like

require_once('C:/Program Files/PHP/PEAR/PHPUnit/Framework/TestCase.php');
require_once('C:/Program Files/PHP/PEAR/PHPUnit/TextUI/TestRunner.php');

However, when I included the TestRunner.php file I got this error:

'Fatal error: Cannot redclare class PHPUnitTextUITestRunner in 
C:\Program Files\PHP\PEAR\PHPUnit\TextTI\TestRunner.php on line 783'

I removed the second require_once from above and everything seems to still work ok.

6) From lines 149 – 197 is a bunch of commented out code. By uncommenting this I was able to run my tests here.

So, for example, I just want to play with the HTML Validator for now, so I replaced the commented block with:

PHPUnitTextUITestRunner::run(TheCodeTrainEasyFrontendTestSuite::suite(
    array(
        'html' => array(
            'validator' => 'http://validator.w3.org/check', // don't use this use a local one!
            'tests' => array(
                array('http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/01/11/oh-hay-i-has-bad-newz/')
            )
        )
    )
));

7) I wasted far too much time being an eejit and trying to run the validator at ‘http://mylocalvalidator’ rather than ‘http://mylocalvalidator/check’

8) To run the suite, return to the command line and depending on where you’ve extracted the suite, type something like:

phpunit C:\Development\frontentTestSuite\suite\TheCodeTrainEasyFrontendTestSuite.php

I now get a lovely slew of validation errors in my command line window. I’ve not got as far as doing anything useful with them yet. I’m hoping that I can easily integrate this into a build process using the PHPUnit plugin for Maven – I’ll let you know how I get on!