On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new tutorial showing you how to automate your PHP development and deployment with Phake.

As developers, we often have to do repetitive tasks such as updating the database structure, seeding the database, writing CRUD code, running tests, and uploading files to a server. Wouldn’t it be great if we could automate these mundane tasks and proceed with solving the more important problems such as making our app more secure or more usable to our users? Phake, an automation tool written for PHP, can do those tasks for you.

They show you how to use Phake (not to be confused with this Phake) including getting it installed via Composer and the creation of a first Phakefile. The include examples of simple tasks, dependencies, grouping, adding descriptions and passing arguments. The command to run the tasks and the resulting output is also included.