Thanks for comments. I appreciate your insight into the way that the drupal_install_system() and drupal_install_profile() functions operate. I agree that the database setup by phpunit_setup.inc should match the production database as closely as possible.

I’ll take a closer look at install.php and see if I can create a function to setup the environment correctly in both Drupal 5 and 6.

THANKS for all of the kind comments in your article and for linking back to my blog. Greatly appreciated! I found some time today to try out your stuff: The first thing I did was to install Drupal 5 and download your “drupal6_backports.inc” and “phpunit_setup_drupal5.inc” files. I followed all of the steps in your article, and was able to reproduce the same problems you did, and then got it all to work by following your instructions… nice job! I’m definitely impressed that you got it all to work without making any changes at all to what I had originally written, except for using db_fetch_array instead of just db_result. One cool thing about what you’ve done is that your unit tests could help you someday when you do have to or want to upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6. You just remove drupal6_backports.inc, replace Drupal with the newer version and re-run your tests… if anything fails you know you have a problem to look into. If they pass then your application should continue to work. Normally upgrading Drupal can be a nightmare; with a test harness to help you it should be much easier.

As a sanity check I also compared the MySQL schema created by your code vs. a standard Drupal 5 install. If you look at the code in “install.php” in the root folder of Drupal 5, you can see how a Drupal 5 site is normally setup. What I found is that there are three extra tables created by phpunit_setup_drupal5.inc and drupal6_backports.inc that aren’t created by the standard install code in install.php: these tables are “locales_meta,” “locales_source” and “locales_target.” It turned out this difference was caused by phpunit_setup_drupal5.inc passing in “en” to drupal_install_modules(drupal_verify_profile(‘default’, ‘en’)), while during a standard Drupal 5 setup in English this locale value would be null. There were no other major differences between the standard Drupal 5 database and the test Drupal 5 database your code created. Cool!

The one suggestion I have to make things a bit safer and cleaner would be to just emulate what install.php in Drupal 5 does, calling Drupal 5 functions where possible, instead of moving some of the Drupal 6 code back into Drupal 5. For example, instead of calling drupal_install_system() from Drupal 6 and then drupal_install_modules(drupal_verify_profile(‘default’, ‘en’)), you could just call the Drupal 5 drupal_install_profile() function (see install.php around line 88 for where it’s called, and install.inc line 309 for the function).

Let me know what you think and then we can post the updated phpunit_setup.inc in a common place (github). Thanks again!

and whats the media one for?