Matthew Weier O'Phinney has a new post to his site today showing you how you can automate PHPUnit runs while doing local development with the help of a little Node.

I've been trying to automate everything this year. When working on OSS, this is usually as simple as setting up Travis CI; in some cases, even that becomes a little more involved, but remains possible.

But that's continuous integration. What about continuous development? With continuous integration, every time I push to a branch associated with a pull request or on the origin repository, a build is triggered. [...] Ideally, I should also be testing locally. [...] I'd like to automate running these as part of my development process. I want continuous development cycles.

He then walks you through the automation setup he's devised for his own local development, adding a few lines to his Composer configuration for scripts to run when "composer check" is called. This is where Node comes in: he uses Gulp (and a few dependencies) to watch the filesystem for changes. With that setup configured and working, he can then just run "gulp" and a Node process executes and watches for those changes. When an update is discovered, "composer check" is executed and a system notification is fired if an error pops up. He's also created a package you can use to set this all up a bit simpler, only requiring a single command to execute.