Building a PHP Test Environment on Ubuntu

The following instructions were written for and tested on Ubuntu 9.10. It possible these same instructions will work on other versions of Ubuntu. Please update all installed packages before starting to build your test environment.

Building a PHP test environment on Ubuntu is a two step process:

1. Download the Automated Build Scripts
2. Run the Build Script

We recommend you run tests you've written against the three main branches of PHP: 5.2, 5.3 and Trunk.

The rest of the instructions assume you will be building your test environment on your user's home directory “~/”. If you choose to build in another location, please change the corresponding paths in all commands found throughout the rest of the instructions.

Open up a Terminal window and run the following commands in order:

cd ~/

wget http://www.ericstewart.org/public/phpt/PHP-Test-Build-Scripts.tgz

tar -xzf PHP-Test-Build-Scripts.tgz

You've now downloaded and uncompressed the build scripts into your home directory.

Copy the build script to your home directory using this command:

cp PHP-Test-Build-Scripts/Ubuntu-9.10.sh ./

Make the build script executable with this command:

chmod +x ./Ubuntu-9.10.sh

Now, you simply run the shell script using this command:

./Ubuntu-9.10.sh

You have now built a test environment for PHP on your desktop. The build environment will include a folder for each of the main PHP branches: “php52”, “php53”, and “php-trunk”.

Watch a Screencast demonstration of this entire process. Screencast demonstration.