The problem I had

When I had initially installed PEAR I just used it’s suggested paths and didn’t think it would be any problem. I could install phpunit and use it from the command line. But when I wanted to configure NetBeans to use PHPUnit I got the following error:

Selected PHPUnit (version ?.?.?) is too old, upgrade it if possible (the minimum version in 3.3.0).

After reading some posts, trying to fix it through editing all the php.ini’s, reinstalling PHPUnit, … I still kept on getting errors. Finally I decided to take the time to restart from scratch and make sure all php related stuff would be kept in the MAMP directories so that in the future problems like this would be easier to solve. I removed the old php, phpunit, pear, … binaries from /usr/local/bin and replaced them by symlinks to the ones in the MAMP directory.

This tutorials shows how I installed PEAR and PHPUnit from scratch.

Installing PEAR for MAMP

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cd /Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.3/
curl -O http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar
./bin/php ./go-pear.phar 

Now pear will suggest a file layout for you, but it will try to put everything in your home directory, while most of it should be in your MAMP folder. The following is the correct layout:

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 1. Installation base ($prefix)                   : /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.3
 2. Temporary directory for processing            : /tmp/pear/install
 3. Temporary directory for downloads             : /tmp/pear/install
 4. Binaries directory                            : /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.3/bin
 5. PHP code directory ($php_dir)                 : /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.3/lib/php
 6. Documentation directory                       : /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.3/lib/php/doc
 7. Data directory                                : /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.3/lib/php/data
 8. User-modifiable configuration files directory : /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.3/conf
 9. Public Web Files directory                    : /Applications/MAMP/htdocs
10. Tests directory                               : /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.3/lib/php/tests
11. Name of configuration file                    : /Users/yourusername/.pearrc

Of course the php5.3/ and username/ could be different for you. By setting the paths this way all PEAR packages will automatically land inside the standard PHP include_path of MAMP.

Now let’s go to /usr/local/bin and create a symlink to the pear command in your MAMP directory. This is an easy way to make sure it’s in you PATH, allowing you to be able to just type pear to use it.

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cd /usr/local/bin
ln -s /Applications/MAMP/bin/php5.3/bin/pear

If you want to you can repeat this for php, phpunit and the others too.

Installing PHPUnit

Now that we have PEAR installed installing PHPUnit is easy.

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sudo pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
sudo pear install --alldeps phpunit/PHPUnit

Starting from PHPUnit 3.6.8 the functionality behind “phpunit –skeleton-class” and “phpunit –skeleton-test” is marked as deprecated and it’s going to be removed in 3.7. So it’s best to install phpunit-skelgen too:

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sudo pear install phpunit/PHPUnit_SkeletonGenerator

Having now installed PEAR and PHPUnit properly, you should be able to easily configure NetBeans for use with PHPUnit.