Raphael Stolt has a new post looking at a technique to ensure that your Phing buildfile is how it should be via unit testing it.

While transforming some of the Ant buildfile refactorings described in Julian Simpson's seminal essay into a Phing context, it felt plainly wrong that I didn't have any tests for the buildfile to back me up on obtaining the pristine behaviour throughout the process. While Ant users can rely on an Apache project called AntUnit there are currently no tailor-made tools available for testing or verifying Phing buildfiles.

He includes an sample build file that will be tested and some PHPUnit code to execute the build and run several tests on the results like githubCloneAdhocTaskShouldBeDefined, targetLogBuildShouldBeAPrivateOne, propertyGithubReposDirShouldBeSet and more.