David Para has written up a tutorial for his blog today about working with Scala to create a build tool for his PHP repositories.

So what do I exactly need? I want to build multiple versions of PHP from the same branch without checking out the code twice. I also want to configure these builds somewhere without always typing in the parameter list or so. For further versions I want to be able to configure these in a file that can easily be distributed to other machines.

He includes the basic Scala script to make the build process work - defining the locations of the build tools, setting up a few parameters and define a few build parameters for his PHP6, PHP6-debug, PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.3-debug installations. An example of running the script is also given, passing in the name of the script along with the target to the java VM (or tell it to build all instances). You can download the jar file here.