Setting-Up Phing Manual (Non-Pear)

If you are not using the PEAR installer, you will need to setup your environment in order to run Phing. The distribution of Phing consists of three directories: bin , docs and classes. Only the bin, classes and etc directories are required to run Phing. To install Phing, choose a directory and uncompress the distribution file in that directory (you may already have done this in a prior step). This directory will be known as PHING_HOME .

On earlier Windows installations, the script used to launch Phing will have problems if PHING_HOME is a long filepath. This is due to limitations in the OS's handling of the "for" batch-file statement. It is recommended, therefore, that Phing be installed in a short path, such as C:\opt\phing.

Before you can run Phing there is some additional set up you will need to do perform:

Add the full path to the bin/ directory to your path.
Set the PHING_HOME environment variable to the directory where you installed Phing. On some operating systems the Phing wrapper scripts can guess PHING_HOME (Unix dialects and Windows). However, it is better to not rely on this behavior.
Set the PHP_COMMAND environment variable to where your Php binary is located (including the binary i.e. PHP_COMMAND=/usr/bin/php).
Set the PHP_CLASSPATH environment variable (see the section below). This should be set at least point to PHING_HOME/classes. Alternatively, you can also just add the phing/classes directory to your PHP include_path ini setting.
Check your php.ini file to make sure that you have the following settings:
max_execution_time = 0 // unlimited execution time
memory_limit = 32M // you may need more memory depending on size of your build files
If you are using Phing in conjunction with another application, you may need to add additional paths to PHP_CLASSPATH.

Unix

Assuming you are running a Unix dialect operating system with the bash bourne shell and Phing is installed in /opt/phing . The following sets up the environment properly:

export PHP_COMMAND=/usr/bin/php
export PHING_HOME=/opt/phing
export PHP_CLASSPATH=${PHING_HOME}/classes
export PATH=${PATH}:${PHING_HOME}/bin
Windows

On the Windows platfrom, assuming Phing is installed in c:\opt\phing. The following sets up your environment:

set PHP_COMMAND=c:\opt\php\php.exe
set PHING_HOME=c:\opt\phing
set PHP_CLASSPATH=c:\opt\phing\classes
set PATH=%PATH%;%PHING_HOME%\bin


reference : http://phing.info/docs/guide/stable/chapters/Setup.html