Wednesday, 11 April 2007

Learn to Configure and Run PHP's OCI8 Tests

The PHP source code includes tests for all the core functionality and extensions. Christopher Jones in a post over his blog, shows you how to configure and run PHP’s OCI8 tests. He reminds you to run the tests after building PHP.

He cautions you that the test suite cannot run everything. You should test your applications with your new PHP version too. This gives load and real-life testing not possible with PHP's script based test suite. He also suggests to consider contributing tests to the PHP community. He informs, by adding tests that are relevant to your application minimizes the risks of PHP developers breaking PHP features important to you.

Going back to the main topic, he points out that the tests in ext/oci8/tests verify the behavior of the OCI8 extension. To run them he gives the following steps:

• Edit ext/oci8/tests/details.inc and set the Oracle SYSTEM user password for your database
• In your php.ini check that variables_order has ‘E’
• Set any necessary Oracle environment variables in your shell
• Run the tests