Get Json output for PHPUnit 10

2024-01-27

Early this year, I created a few custom Rector rules for our client. It modified the code based on the PHPUnit error result report.

The only problem is that PHPUnit outputs a string. So, I had to parse it manually with regexes.

Having a JSON output would make my life easier. I'm used to PHP tools that provide the JSON out of the box, but I could not find it in PHPUnit.

So I asked on Twitter:

Hello internet, I need to pipe @phpunit output to another tool and look for a json format. I can't find it in the options, neither GPT knows how.

Any ideas how it's doable?
— Tomas Votruba (@VotrubaT) January 8, 2024

Most of the replies were about a custom printer. It sounds easy; let's try it! Unfortunately, it worked only up to PHPUnit 9.

PHPUnit 10 introduced a brand new event system that removed the custom printer completely. Any single operation is now an event. There are few helpful sources about it, so asking GPT fails hard with PHPUnit 9 context.

I thought, "Parsing text is not that bad, is it?"

Upgrading Rector book with Custom PHPUnit output

Coincidentally, I've worked on upgrading Rector book past 3 weeks. We've just released a new Rector version, so I want to keep the book up to date for new readers. We generate book samples from actual code, from actual tests, with... PHPUnit output.

Guess what? We've used PHPUnit 9 so far, and to limit the output to fit 72 chars in a book, we used - a custom printer! That doesn't work anymore, but we still need PHPUnit output to look nice in the book. So, I had to learn the new event system anyway.

After that experience, creating a PHPUnit JSON result printer extension was a piece of cake.

PHPUnit Json Result output

Add package

composer require --dev tomasvotruba/phpunit-json-result-printer

<extensions>
    <bootstrap class="TomasVotruba\PHPUnitJsonResultPrinter\PHPUnitJsonResultPrinterExtension" />
</extensions>

Run PHPUnit and see the result:

vendor/bin/phpunit

And see the result:

{
    "counts": {
        "tests": 1,
        "failed": 1,
        "assertions": 1,
        "errors": 0,
        "warnings": 0,
        "deprecations": 0,
        "notices": 0,
        "success": 1,
        "incomplete": 0,
        "risky": 0,
        "skipped": 0
    },
    "failed": [
        {
            "test_class": "TomasVotruba\\PHPUnitJsonResultPrinter\\Test\\OutputCleanerTest",
            "test_method": "testSame",
            "message": "Failed asserting that 'not equal' is identical to 100.",
            "exception_class": "PHPUnit\\Framework\\ExpectationFailedException",
            "line": 16,
            "data_provider": {
                "key": 0,
                "data": "Array &0 [\n    0 => 'not equal',\n    1 => 100,\n]",
                "provider_method": "provideData"
            }
        }
    ]
}

Now you can pipe it into any other tool like Rector or PHPStan and build your following rules based on it:

    public static function provideData(): Iterator
    {
        yield [
-           'not equal',
            100,
        ];
    }

Happy coding!

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