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Amit Merchant

Amit Merchant

A blog on PHP, JavaScript, and more

Skip PHPUnit Tests Conditionally in PHP

Sometimes you may want to skip a PHPUnit test conditionally. For instance, you may want to skip a test if the PHP version is less than 7.4 or if a certain extension is not installed on the system.

I learned about this in this PR where the author wanted to skip all the tests if intl extension is not installed on the system that’s because the code uses PHP’s NumberFormatter class which is a part of intl extension.

So, here’s how you can skip PHPUnit tests conditionally.

You define a method in the class where you check for the condition and if the condition is met, you call the markTestSkipped() method (with a message) on the $this object. This will skip the test.

protected function needsIntlExtension()
{
    if (! extension_loaded('intl')) {
        $this->markTestSkipped('The intl extension is not installed. Please install the extension to enable '.__CLASS__);
    }
}

Then, you call this method in the setUp() method of the test class or at the top of the test method itself.

public function setUp(): void
{
    $this->needsIntlExtension();
}

That’s it. Now, if the intl extension is not installed on the system, the test will be skipped.

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