PHP Class not found from a different namespace

Question

I'm currently working on a Symfony2 project with Phpspec and I'm having problems to extend a Spec class described in a different namespace.

In my project, for instance, I'm having the following class described in spec/Acme/Model/Foo/FooSpec.php :

namespace spec\Acme\Model\Foo;

use PhpSpec\ObjectBehavior;
use Prophecy\Argument;

abstract class FooSpec extends ObjectBehavior{
    //some code here
}

And I have another class in spec/Acme/Model/Bar/BarSpec.php extending FooSpec :

namespace spec\Acme\Model\Bar;

use spec\Acme\Model\Foo\FooSpec;

class BarSpec extends FooSpec{
    //some code here
}

When I try to run phpspec, I have the following error :

PHP Fatal error: Class 'spec\Acme\Model\Foo\FooSpec' not found in /home/user/Projects/Acme/spec/Acme/Model/Bar/BarSpec.php on line 9

The only way I found to make it work was to add the following line in spec/Acme/Model/Bar/BarSpec.php:

include('./spec/Acme/Model/Foo/FooSpec.php');

I don't know why I have to include this specific file to make it run, especially when the other classes (like PhpSpec\ObjectBehavior) are correctly found.

Do you have any idea why is this happening?

---

Edit:

As suggested by @Phil and @Sheikh Heera in the comments, I tried to set up an autoload to register my spec namespace but it's not working neither. Here is what I tried so far :

require_once getcwd() . '/vendor/composer/ClassLoader.php';

$loader = new \Composer\Autoload\ClassLoader();

// register classes with namespaces
$loader->add('spec', getcwd().'/spec');

// activate the autoloader
$loader->register();

I also tried to modify the file vendor/composer/autoload_namespaces.php to add this :

return array(
    //some code here

    'spec' => array(getcwd() . '/spec'),
    //some more code

);

But still the same error. I also tried with 'spec' => array(getcwd()) or $loader->add('spec', getcwd()); just to see what will happen and this time I get a Cannot redeclare class on another spec class.

---

My php version is PHP 5.4.9-4ubuntu2.4 (cli).

Thank you in advance for your help.

Answer 1

A more generic solution is to put the spec directory into the autoload-dev configuration of your composer.json:

"autoload-dev": {
    "psr-0": {
        "spec\\":""
    }
},

This way, composer will generate the namespace also for the specs, which should be on the root of the repository:

return array(
     'spec\\' => array($baseDir . '/'),
     ...
);