PHPUnit 3.4 requires PHP 5.1.4 (or later) but PHP 5.3.2 (or later) is highly recommended. It should be installed using the PEAR Installer. This installer is the backbone of PEAR, which provides a distribution system for PHP packages, and is shipped with every release of PHP since version 4.3.0.

The PEAR channel (pear.phpunit.de) that is used to distribute PHPUnit needs to be registered with the local PEAR environment. Furthermore, a component that PHPUnit depends upon is hosted on the Symfony Components PEAR channel (pear.symfony-project.com).

pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com

This has to be done only once. Now the PEAR Installer can be used to install packages from the PHPUnit channel:

pear install phpunit/PHPUnit

After the installation you can find the PHPUnit source files inside your local PEAR directory; the path is usually /usr/lib/php/PHPUnit.

Although using the PEAR Installer is the only supported way to install PHPUnit, you can install PHPUnit manually. For manual installation, do the following:

  1. Download a release archive from http://pear.phpunit.de/get/ and extract it to a directory that is listed in the include_path of your php.ini configuration file.

  2. Prepare the phpunit script:

    1. Rename the phpunit.php script to phpunit.

    2. Replace the @php_bin@ string in it with the path to your PHP command-line interpreter (usually /usr/bin/php).

    3. Copy it to a directory that is in your path and make it executable (chmod +x phpunit).

  3. Prepare the PHPUnit/Util/PHP.php script:

    1. Replace the @php_bin@ string in it with the path to your PHP command-line interpreter (usually /usr/bin/php).