PHPUnit 9

February 7, 2020

The PHPUnit development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PHPUnit 9. This release adds new features, changes and removes existing features, and fixes bugs.

A detailed list of changes is available here. More background on some of these changes is given here.

PHPUnit now requires PHP 7.3 (or newer)

Active support for PHP 7.2 ended on November 30, 2019. The only actively supported versions of PHP as of February 7, 2020 are PHP 7.3 and PHP 7.4.

PHPUnit now uses (more) PHP 7 syntax

The first lines of code for PHPUnit were written back when PHP 4 was the "latest and greatest". In order to keep PHPUnit compatible with new versions of PHP and to make new features possible, the codebase of PHPUnit needs constant modernization.

It has taken Sebastian Bergmann thousands of hours to develop, test, and support PHPUnit.

Perhaps now is the time to contribute to the development of PHPUnit or sponsor Sebastian's work.

A lot of time and effort went into the development of PHPUnit 9 to make better use of language features such as strict interpretation of scalar type declarations, for instance, that were introduced in PHP 7.

Backward Incompatible Changes

The following functionality was removed:

Annotation(s) for expecting exceptions
Assertions (and helper methods) that operate on (non-public) attributes
Optional parameters of assertEquals() and assertNotEquals()
Optional parameters of assertContains() and assertNotContains()
Optional parameters of assertFileEquals() etc.
assertInternalType() and assertNotInternalType()
assertArraySubset()
setUseErrorHandler()
expectExceptionMessageRegExp()
Support for doubling multiple interfaces
Support for using class name as CLI argument
Support for declaring more that one test case class in test source file

Looking Forward

The following features have been deprecated in PHPUnit 9:

expectException(PHPUnit\Framework\Error\*)
MockBuilder::setMethods()
Support for ClassName<*> as values for @covers and @uses annotations

The features deprecated in PHPUnit 9 will be removed in PHPUnit 10.

Getting PHPUnit 9

We distribute a PHP Archive (PHAR) that contains everything you need in order to use PHPUnit. Alternatively, you may use Composer to download and install PHPUnit as well as its dependencies.

Here is a tutorial that gets you started.

Supported Versions

Detailed information on supported versions of PHPUnit is available here. Below is a summary as of February 7, 2020:

PHPUnit 9 receives bug fixes until February 4, 2022
PHPUnit 8 receives bug fixes until February 5, 2021
PHPUnit 7 has reached its End of Life on February 7, 2020 and no longer receives bug fixes