Pound :: Easy Unit Testing For WordPress

For more information about how it works, why you may want to use it, and how to set up and run unit tests for your WordPress plugins, please see this article: http://leehblue.com/unit-testing-wordpress-plugins/

Pound was created to make it fast and easy to start writing unit tests for your WordPress plugins. You can run the plugin on the actual site where you are developing if you don’t have a test site. There is virtually no configuration necessary to start writing tests. The overall intention of this plugin is to make unit testing more accessible to WordPress plugin developers.

PHPUnit is a very powerful tool and is great for testing PHP code including WordPress plugins. In fact, if you get into using WP-CLI you will notice that there is built-in support for using PHPUnit to test your code. Pound is not intended to replace the need for PHPUnit. It is intended to provide an easy way to get started with unit testing WordPress plugins. It’s a great option for small to medium sized plugins.

On one hand, Pound and PHPUnit are both tools to help you run automated tests for your code. Pound is built as a WordPress plugin, and therefore really only intended to be used for WordPress development. PHPUnit can be used to test any codebase. The main benefits of Pound over PHPUnit are ease of use. Pound has one boolean check at the end of each tests. PHPUnit has a very large number of assertions. Pound requires virtually no configuration to start using. PHPUnit requires XML configuration files to set up your testing environment. Pound runs right in your web browser with clean, colorful output. PHPUnit is a command line tool.