In a post to his site Rob Allen shares a basic setup for using Circle CI with a PHP project for continuous integration. Circle CI provides the resources to build your project and perform tasks such as run unit tests or even deploy the resulting code to the production environment.

For a new client project, I've decided to use CircleCI to run my tests every time I push to GitHub. This turned out to be quite easy; this is how I did it.

He shares the contents of his .circleci/config.yml configuration file creating a Docker environment each time the build is executed, installing the required software, executing Composer install and running PHPCS and PHPUnit tests. He shares an example of the output from a build and how he hooked in Slack to receive notifications when the builds were complete (and pass/fail status).

Cees-Jan Kiewiet has written up a post showing how he combines S3 and CircleCI to deploy a Sculpin site for his blog. Sculpin is a popular PHP-based static site generator.

Until 10 minutes before the start of this month I had a VPS at Digital Ocean running with Jenkins and Gitolite on it for privately hosted repositories. With Github's recent move to unlimited repositories I really didn't have a need to host them myself anymore, and after playing with CircleCI's free tier it didn't make any sense anymore to keep that VPS up.

Since porting git over to another remote is as more Github's domain we're focusing on deploying Sculpin to S3 using CircleCI in this post.

He starts by outlining some of the prerequisites to get in place before trying to set up the process on your own application. He shows you how to set up an IAM user for the S3 bucket and configure CircleCI though a simple YAML file. He also mentions the set up for tests, loading in other dependencies needed (Composer) and finally the deployment that executes Sculpin's "generate" command to build the site.