Unit testing a symfony service class with phpunit - symfony

Question

I have a basic class GenericHelper.php in directory Foo/BarBundle/Helper
I registered it as a service in Foo/BarBundle/Resources/config/services.yml:
parameters:
generic_helper.class: Foo\BarBundle\Helper\GenericHelper
services:
generic_helper:
class: %generic_helper.class%
and I'm able to access it in a command by doing the following:
$helper = $this->getContainer()->get('generic_helper');
Now, I'd like to unit test that class with PHPUnit; I have the following code (similar to http://symfony.com/doc/2.0/book/testing.html#unit-tests):
namespace Foo\BarBundle\Tests\Helper;
use Foo\BarBundle\Helper\GenericHelper;
class GenericHelperTest extends \PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase {
public function testSomeMethod() {
$helper = new GenericHelper(); //line 10
$this->assertEquals($helper->someMethod(), SOME_RESULT);
}
}
Running PHPUnit results in the following error:
PHP Fatal error: Class 'Foo\BarBundle\Helper\GenericHelper' not found in /DIR/src/Foo/BarBundle/Tests/Helper/GenericHelperTest.php on line 10
Grepping for 'GenericHelper' only yields a few results:
the Class itself and the Test class
the services.yml file
appDevDebugProjectContainer files in app/cache/dev/, which have all the service getters
Question(s):
Does Symfony prevent PHPUnit from directly constructing a service class?
Is there a way to do this without creating a Symfony Container then accessing the service (as done here: Access Symfony 2 container via Unit test?)? I mean, it's still just a basic class...

Answer 1

Running phpunit with the -c flag pointing to the directory containing the phpunit.xml.dist file solved the issue. Doing this includes bootstrap.php.cache and therefore the autoloading stuff necessary.