Editing Symfony Testing Cookbook (section)

== Unit/functional tests with database connections on remote machines ==

Remember that since `phpunit` is running from the command-line, the remote host is NOT `localhost` like it would be when invoking a controller through a browser request. Otherwise, the server returns a 500 error stating that access is denied for `user@localhost` or whatever.

when running `phpunit`, it's necessary to switch the database host from `localhost` to the ip address of the MySQL server. 

Set up two separate Symfony "parameters" configuration files, `parameters.yml` and `parameters_remote.yml`. Load the `_remote` parameters into `/app/config/config_test.yml`:

<syntaxhighlight lang="yaml">
# /app/config/config_test.yml
imports:
    # ...
    - { resource: parameters_remote.yml }
#...

doctrine:
    dbal:
        driver:   "%database_driver%"
        host:     "%database_host%"
        port:     "%database_port%"
        dbname:   "%database_name%"
        user:     "%database_user%"
        password: "%database_password%"
        charset:  UTF8
</syntaxhighlight>