There is a lot of stuff you're fiddling with while trouble-shooting your issue, so there can be only giving extended comments on it. Take it with a grain of salt and pick the pieces that make sense to you, it looks to me you're clever and should be close to the point where you connect the dots more soon than later (don't give up):
C:\Repos\Project\TDD>php vendor/bin/phpunit
This on your windows shell prompt command the php binary to execute the (php) script vendor/bin/phpunit.
And PHP does exactly this (everything else would be a surprise, right?), it executes that script.
The output you see confirms it. As php is the PHP CLI SAPI (PHP Command Line Binary), the first line starting with # is not output (you can find this behaviour described in the PHP documentation as well: https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.usage.php and on antoher place that I can't find right now that exactly describes this difference to the common mode https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.basic-syntax.phpmode.php).
You then correctly analyze:
This is the content of the phpunit shell script.
and make the note on the shebang line:
#!/usr/bin/env sh
So this looks to me that this shell script vendor/bin/phpunit is not to be executed with the given commandline:
php vendor/bin/phpunit
but instead just by:
C:\Repos\Project\TDD>vendor/bin/phpunit
Which won't (or might not) work on your windows system.
Some more background information (this applies to phpunit bin-stubs as well as other when installed as composer(1) dependencies):
- composer manages these scripts (for you)
- composer handles them for POSIX compatible systems as well as for others (compare the
/usr/bin/env sh which is stupid, it's /bin/sh, always, may need a report on the composer project) incl. windows or windows with cygwin or WSL running on Windows, Vagrant box setups etc. pp. (yes they really care since years).
- composer handles this at the time of install/update.
- for windows (which I can't compare are not using it but from what I remember) composer is adding
.bat or .cmd files next to the commands (as that is how Windows handles executables).
So mabye using:
C:\Repos\Project\TDD>composer exec phpunit
already solves your invocation problem.
Or
C:\Repos\Project\TDD>vendor\bin\phpunit.bat
Or
C:\Repos\Project\TDD>vendor\bin\phpunit.cmd
Or
C:\Repos\Project\TDD>vendor\bin\phpunit
does. Point in case is this: https://getcomposer.org/doc/articles/vendor-binaries.md
All in all this looks to me you got instructions from one developer working on a unixoide sytem (Mac, Linux) and you're running on Windows. This should not pose a problem on that level, however the onboarding in your team might be low or it's just the knowledge management (unfortunately after a decade or more of Stackoverflow this got worse) and you've been left alone with the trouble shooting.
It's not a programming problem, but merely getting the tooling to run.
Perhaps there is some regime about composer and running it which prevents you from looking there first. But this is hard to say on Stackoverflow.
I'd start fresh with the project, remove it from disk and install it anew. This must work, always. To not sink the current project you can do this a-new in a second directory (the project might support composer create-project to give it a quick start - that is cloning new and doing the composer install).
Similar it is that you could do a composer update in the existing project (which is intended to modify it and depending on how well the project you work with is integrated with composer and your development platform will enable or break things).
At the end of the day the common workflow is:
> rmdir vendor
(remove the vendor directory, that is the blank slate)
> composer install
(install the vendor directory, that is all PHP dependencies of the project)
> composer exec phpunit
(execute the phpunit test-runner)
Edit: Interestingly, I uploaded it all to my LAMP webserver and ran the same script there, and it is not executing there either. It's outputting the files...
Never install phpunit on a webserver system. Run it in development or CI, but not on the webserver. Period. (this has security implications, and it won't help you to execute it there, you need to run it where you develop when you're doing TDD - keep this focus for troubleshooting)
The true path to the PHP script that is represented by vendor/bin/phpunit is:
vendor/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/phpunit
(you can find it in the composer.json of phpunit https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/blob/master/composer.json#L66)
Given your original command-line and from the various other information you give, this should work:
php vendor/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/phpunit
vendor\bin\phpunitinstead ofvendor/bin/phpunit?