The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post today introducing you to an alternative for hosting your own PHP packages privately using the Gemfury service. Gemfury is a hosted (PaaS) tool that lets you host packages (and not just Composer/PHP ones) without the need to have them public on Packagist.

Composer works effectively and seamlessly in conjunction with Packagist, a comprehensive repository of public packages. However, sooner or later the time will come when you’ve written your own package which, for whatever reason, cannot be open-sourced and shared freely via Packagist. There are a few options for hosting these private packages [like adding them manually, Satis or Toran Proxy]. [...] Gemfury is a PaaS alternative. Aside from the peace-of-mind that comes from a hosted solution – albeit one which comes at a price – one huge advantage is that it supports not just PHP Composer packages, but Ruby Gems, Node.js npm, Python PyPi, APT, Yum and Nu-Get.

He spends the rest of the article walking you through the creation of an account (with the 14-day free trial) and how to create a new package that will be pushed to the service. He adds one dependency (Faker) and a bit of code for the push. He shows how to add the git remote for the Genfury service, tag a release and deploy the result out to the service. He updates this by showing how to take that same repository and making it private, requiring a "secret code" to be able to access. He ends the post with a quick mention of other methods to work with the Genfury service including their own command line tool, fury.

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.