Release Announcement for PHPUnit 4.8.0

The PHPUnit development team announces the immediate availability of PHPUnit 4.8.0. This release adds new features and fixes bugs. A detailed list of changes is available here.

New Features

• The @testWith annotation was added as "syntactic sugar" for defining data providers
• The --no-coverage commandline option was added for ignoring any code coverage configuration from the configuration file
• The --check-version commandline option was added for checking whetherthe current version of PHPUnit is used (PHAR only)

Changes

• The argument check of assertContains() and assertNotContains() is now more strict
• The name of the default group was changed from __nogroup__ to default

Obtaining PHPUnit 4.8

We distribute a PHP Archive (PHAR) that contains everything you need in order to use PHPUnit. Simply download it from here, make it executable, and put it into your $PATH, for instance.

Alternatively, you may use Composer to download and install PHPUnit as well as its dependencies.

Requirements

PHPUnit 4.8 requires PHP 5.3.3; using the latest version of PHP is highly recommended. This is the last version of PHPUnit to support PHP 5.3, PHP 5.4, and PHP 5.5 (see below). The documentation has a detailed list of the PHP extensions that are required to use PHPUnit.

Looking Ahead

The goal of our release process is to deliver new features into the hands of our users every two months. The following releases are currently in development:

• PHPUnit 5.0 is the current beta release series of PHPUnit. It will become stable on October 2, 2015.
• PHPUnit 5.1 is the current alpha release series of PHPUnit. It will become stable on December 4, 2015.

PHPUnit 5

Dropping support for PHP 5.3, PHP 5.4, and PHP 5.5

According to our release process, PHPUnit must be compatible with all versions of PHP that are actively supported by the PHP project.

Active support for PHP 5.3 ended on July 11, 2013, active support for PHP 5.4 ended on September 14, 2014, and active support for PHP 5.5 ended on June 20, 2015. The only actively supported version of PHP at the time of writing is PHP 5.6.

PHPUnit 5, which is scheduled for October 2, 2015, will no longer support PHP 5.3, PHP 5.4, and PHP 5.5. As PHPUnit follows Semantic Versioning the major version number must be incremented when the minimum required version of PHP is increased.

Removal of deprecated functionality

Functionality that is marked as deprecated in PHPUnit 4 will be removed in PHPUnit 5. This includes the following features

• The assertSelectCount(), assertSelectRegExp(), assertSelectEquals(), assertTag(), assertNotTag() assertions
• The --strict commandline switch and the strict configuration file setting
• The configuration file settings related to PHPUnit_Selenium

Support for PHPUnit 4

Following our release process, PHPUnit 4.8 will receive bug fixes until August 7, 2016.