Freek Van der Herten: A tool to automatically rerun PHPUnit tests when source code changes

In this post to his site Freek Van der Herten shares information about a tool that can help to streamline your development workflow. The phpunit-watcher tool mimics tools from other languages to watch for changes in the source of your application and automatically execute your PHPUnit tests when modifications are made.

In the JavaScript world Jest, built by Facebook, is an excellent tool to run tests. Not only can it automatically rerun your tests when source code changes, but there’s also an interactive mode where you can set a filter on which tests to run while the tool is running. Would it be great if we could have these awesome features while working with PHPUnit?

Our newly released phpunit-watcher tool provides a Jest like experience. You can simply install it by running composer global require spatie/phpunit-watcher.

Once the tool is installed it can then be run from the command line, sitting and waiting for changes to the target files and directory. It's configurable in case you don't follow some of the usual package directory structures and can be filtered to only run on certain filename matches. This can also be done manually (real-time) via the tool. Screenshots are included showing the tool in action too.