Alex Bilbie has posted a new tutorial to his site showing you how to set up Jenkins to test a PHP project. Jenkins is a popular automated build tool that can be used to do helpful things like automatically run unit tests and execute other tasks when code changes happen (or on an automated schedule).

After a chat with some other developers on Twitter the other day I offered to write a tutorial on how to setup Jenkins from scratch and create a job to test a PHP project. For this tutorial I'm going to use a Digital Ocean droplet (get $10 free credit with this link) but you can use a server from anywhere. Once I've installed and setup Jenkins I'm going to create a job to test my Proton framework.

He walks you through the setup of the server (Ubuntu running on a Digital Ocean instance) and the commands you'll need to get the required tools installed, including Jenkins. He configures Nginx to work as a proxy for the Jenkins installation (config included) and how to secure the installation. This is done via a GitHub OAuth connection and plugin. He helps you get Composer installed, an SSH in place for committing back to GitHub and creating a first job. He also includes a listing of several helpful tools that can be used to test your scripts and applications to provide more detail and better quality to the resulting code.