 <p>your bootstrap goes in your phpunit.xml config file.</p> <p>So it would look something like:</p> <pre><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt; &lt;phpunit bootstrap="bootstrap.php" colors="true"&gt; &lt;/phpunit&gt; </code></pre> <p>and when you run your test you run it with</p> <pre><code>phpunit --configuration=phpunit.xml </code></pre> <p>For reference: The <a href="https://phpunit.de/manual/current/en/appendixes.configuration.html" rel="nofollow">phpunit.xml config section</a> in the manual.</p>