On the Ibuildings techPortal there's a new tutorial from Ben Longden about setting up Hudson as a continuous integration server for the deployment of your application(s). Tools like Hudson allow you to create consistent builds and automatically handle tasks that might get overlooked by a person doing the deployment.

Continuous integration (CI) is fast becoming part of the standard development model for creating high quality software, and rightly so. Delivering reliably high quality software is in the best interest of yourself, your manager and your clients. This is not an article about Continuous Integration itself, but will introduce Hudson, a key tool, and may help you to implement your own CI strategy.

He talks about one of the most important aspects of continuous integration - unit testing - and how the popular PHPUnit tool easily integrates as a part of a Hudson build. The automation it allows lets you constantly run tests, helping you catch issues before they make it to the live site. He walks you through the install of Hudson, Xdebug, PHPUnit and Ant - all of the tools you'll need for the basic setup. He includes instructions for configuring these tools to work together and some additional tools you can layer on top (like the PHP Mess Detector, PHPCodeSniffer and the PHP Copy and Paste Detector).