In this blog post I'll try to explain how you can setup phpUnderControl and CruiseControl. This guide is mostly focused on getting phpUnderControl to work on a Gentoo Linux system, so some things are OS specific.

You'll already need to have PHP up and running on the machine before starting the process, but Andries gives you everything from there - installing the needed Sun JDK, Xdebug, adding the packages for PHP_CodeSniffer, PHPUnit and phpUnderControl and the scripts to get phpUC and CruiseControl to work together. He also includes a sample project so you can see how to fit yours in.

I was entasked recently with getting a continuous integration environment set up. phpUnderControl seems to be the tool of choice for this these days, so I started off in that direction. [...] Obviously I needed to install PHP itself. CruiseControl is a daemon written in Java, so that needed to be installed as well. Our Linux distro of choice is Debian. With these requirements, I set out.

He walks through the process - downloading the Debian ISO and installing in a VM, installing the needed packages, setting up the correct environment and getting everything started up and running. The end result is a local CruiseControl server with PHP integration, a web interface and plenty of configuration options you can customize for your needs.

The @failonerror-attribute of the -tag in the merge target was set to false, which results in not failed CruiseControl builds. To fix this behaviour, you must modify the merge target in your build.xml.

He includes an example of the fix, showing where to change the failonerror attribute of the exec tag inside of the target. This is also corrected in the most current build, so update your software to prevent issue.

I currently released a new version of phpUnderControl. Beside some minor fixes this release comes with a new feature to aggregate test results of multiple PHPUnit runs. Use the new cli command merge-phpunit of phpUnderControl to merge multiple log files produced with PHPUnit, as shown in [this] example build file for ant.

He defines the XML file to set up the merge for the different PHP binary versions and the merge script to use. A screenshot of the result as presented inside the tool is included.

For now over three years we are working with unit tests. I'd like to share some of those experiences. As we have two frameworks in place for our website, I can compare two different strategies for unit tests.

He talks about their choice of SimpleTest, their test monitoring, CruiseControl and their "if it doesn't pass, you can't release it" mentality to keep their site as bug free as possible.

It integrates three of the best PHP development tools into CruiseControl, combined with an easy setup routine and a small example project.

Sebastian also points out that it can be used with the generated output of PHPUnit, the PHP_CodeSniffer package and the phpDocumentor utility.

You can find out more about phpUnderControl on its wiki page on the PHPUnit website.

Assuring compatibility with new PHP versions is not always easy: Features are added and changed in minor versions, bugs you didn't even know they exist and having been open for years "suddenly" get fixed.

Assuring compatibility however is easy with a little help of CruiseControl as long as you have automated tests for your software: PHP on Cruise.

His tool grabs the latest stable PHP release, compiles it with defined configure options and runs a set of user-defined tests. This makes it simple to run an automated compile and test of your entire installation to ensure that noting has been broken.

An important part of any software development process is getting reliable builds of the software. Despite it's importance, we are often surprised when this isn't done. We stress a fully automated and reproducible build, including testing, that runs many times a day. This allows each developer to integrate daily thus reducing integration problems.

This blog posting will show you how to enable continuous builds with CruiseControl, Ant and PHPUnit. But be warned: Continuous builds are addicting.

They step you through the process - the installation of the needed packages, working with Ant, getting it to talk to Cruise, and the integration of PHPUnit. Finally, they work in a method to notify others (in this case, the management) when successful builds have been compiled.]]> Wed, 08 Mar 2006 07:11:48 -0600