Invoking a URL and retrieving the rendered HTML page in Phing

Question

Hi all,

So this is my dilemma - I am using the excellent codeigniter-simpletest library by Eric Barnes (http://github.com/ericbarnes/codeigniter-simpletest). Its perfect for my purposes, as it adds an endpoint onto the test deployment of my CodeIgniter application, from which I have a dashboard to run all my unit tests and view the results. Everything fine so far.

But now I come to integrating it into my Phing build script (so that a phing release call on my test build will trigger the unit tests and fail the build if any of the tests fail), and I'm stuck.

Due to the integration package to make codeigniter play nice with simpletest, the command line runner of simpletest is not an option (I don't think).

Is there a way to invoke a URL from phing, and grab the resulting HTML? I could insert some hidden HTML into the built unit tests results page and check for it from the Phing task.

Answer 1

A new task (http://phing.info/trac/browser/trunk/classes/phing/tasks/ext/HttpGetTask.php) was recently added to Phing that should help you, it will be released in the next release (2.4.3).