New on PHPBuilder.com today is a tutorial showing you how to use set up and tear down methods in PHPUnit unit tests to work with a Doctrine 2 database, making it simpler to run self-contained testing.

The recently released Doctrine 2 presents significant advantages over its 1.X predecessor, advantages which are even more pronounced when compared to the Zend Framework's default database solution, namely the Zend_Db component. [...] When running unit tests which vet various aspects of your database you'll want to setup (create) and teardown (destroy) the test database, ensuring that a pristine and repeatable version of the database is available to each test.

He includes an example of using the SchemaTool class (of Doctrine) to drop and recreate the schema from scratch with the end result of a clean working copy, ready to test from. He also includes an example of how to initialize the database with some default information using the PHPUnit database connection and a default set of fixtures (defined in YAML).