I just recently stumbled upon PHPUnit's --bootstrap flag. I used to bootstrap each of my unit tests using a require statement at the top of the file. I always found this very tedious, but did not want to write some script to wrap each unit test. The --bootstrap flag solves this problem quite nicely.

My unit tests used to look something like this:

require_once dirname(__FILE__) . '/../TestHelper.php';

class FooTest extends \PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase { ... }

This allowed me to run the tests as part of a suite or run them individually. This worked fine, but it was annoying to always have to make sure the require_once statement was correct. As I create tests in sub-directories I would often forget this. I can now remove the require statement and run the unit test with the following command:

phpunit --bootstrap TestHelper.php crimsontest/FooTest.php

I create a runtests.sh script so I don't have to manually type the phpunit command plus the required flag:

#!/bin/bash
DIR=`dirname $0`
phpunit --bootstrap $DIR/TestHelper.php $DIR/crimsontest/AllTests.php

I already updated all the unit tests in the Crimson framework to use a the bootstrap strategy.