In a new post to his blog Lukas Smith looks at a recently introduced service, Travis CI that helps make continuous integration simple (and without having to set up the software yourself). He talks about his experiences in getting his trial project up and working with their system.

Continuous integration is one of these topics that had a slow start, but in recent years has really taken off. The slow start is likely to be attributed to the fact that it was perceived as hard to setup and maintain. But solutions around Jenkins and Sismo are making it easier and easier. But thanks to the new Travis CI service, its now essentially so easy that there is no excuse not to use CI for PHP projects, at least if you are hosting your OSS code on github.com. What makes this service so crazy cool is that you can run your tests against multiple PHP versions, multiples databases (heck even RabbitMQ) and against multiple versions of various libraries.

Thanks to the "first class" PHP support they offer, setting up a PHP project is as simple as creating a ".travis.yml" file in your github-based project (including PHP versions to test against, dependency management and "before script" tasks to execute). If you're looking for a CI platform without a lot of the hassle involved in the usual setup, you'd do well to check out Travis CI.

You can also see another example of a project setup in this post from Travis Swicegood.