On his site James Wade has posted the first part of a tutorial showing you how to get your PHP application set up for continuous integration with Jenkins and Docker. In this part of the series he focuses on the setup of the technology involved, linking to every tool you'll need.

I’ve been developing in PHP now for longer than I haven’t. Going from using PHP as a hammer to a nail, using it to allow forms to send emails, to operating popular open source projects, to leading a team of developers in a business enterprise. One key advice I learned from running an open source project on the SourceForge platform was “release early, release often”.

This is a mantra that I’ve always tried to stick to and its always brought me good results. As I get into more and more complex projects, both in code structure and politically, I find myself turning to tools to solve problems. One of those tools is Continuous Integration.

He talks about coding styles and IDE automation that can help make you code better and cleaner but points out that there's more to be done than just that. He briefly covers the idea behind continuous integration and why he chose Jenkins for his environment. He then gets into the setup process, showing how to get tools like PHPUnit, phploc, phpmd and phpcpd installed. He includes the dockerfile to set up this environment and the bash script that handles the setup process. He finishes the post with a brief look at the automation that happens thanks to the Jenkinsfile configuration and what's coming in part two of the series.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial from Alex Bilbie that "re-introduces you to Jenkins", a popular build automation software, and how you can integrate it, and a new feature called "pipelines", into your processes.

As our applications become more complex – with Composer dependencies, Webpack build scripts, and per-environment variables – we inevitably reach a point where testing all of these different intricacies becomes slow and laborious, especially when you’re tearing down and rebuilding the entire environment for each test. Likewise, code style might deviate over time and creating a production ready deployment archive requires a specific set of steps to be followed.

He talks about some common tasks that might be involved in the build (installing Composer libs, running PHPUnit, etc) and how automating them can help prevent issues and make it less time consuming for your developers as they make changes. Along with the latest version of Jenkins (v2.0) they introduced the "pipelines plugin". Pipelines allow you to define multi-step configurations Jenkins then uses when the build is executed. He walks you through installing Jenkins, setting it up and creating your first job. They provide the example pipeline script to get you started. There's also a section talking about the Jenkinsfile and setting it up in the Jenkins job to automatically be used (instead of a config in-job).

He finishes the post looking at multibranch pipelines and some things "taking it further" by adding in other plugins, customized with their own section in the Jenkinsfile configuration.

The MyBuilder.com Tech blog has posted a tutorial showing you how to manage your Jenkins builds and configuration using PHP via the Jenkins REST API interface and a few handy curl calls.

I decided to create a simple PHP console script that can be run (or added as a git-hook) to maintain synchronization between the branch you are working on and the branch Jenkins is building. Whilst developing this script, it dawned on me that many other automated use-cases could be achieved with the ability to easily update a projects configuration file. [...] Jenkins fortunately provides us with a RESTful interface to manage typical tasks and activities. Included in this is the ability to read the XML configuration file for a specified project.

The tutorial includes examples of requests you can make to the API to do things like:

• Reading the Projects Configuration
• Writing to the Projects Configuration
• Sending a Project Build Request

The post ends with the full script, a procedural process that executes each of the above steps in order (with an interesting use of the "goto" functionality).

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.

Stephan Hochdörfer has a quick post showing how he has PHPunit up and working on an HHVM instance. His problem was that the tests were actually executing using the "php" binary, not the HHVM one.

For quite some time we run the unit tests for our libs and tools against PHP and HHVM, at least that is what I thought up to now. As it turns out I missed a minor detail. [...] What happens now is that Phing is executed via HHVM but PHPUnit will still be executed via the PHP binary because the PHPUnit shell script will look for the php binary in the PATH configuration. Since we run HHVM side-by-side with PHP on our Jenkins build nodes I was not able to point /usr/bin/php to /usr/bin/hhvm - which would be the easiest and cleanest solution. I

He shares the workaround he created, creating a symbolic link between the hhvm and php binaries and then executing the Phing task to run the tests. This is being run via Jenkins and uses it's "WORKSPACE" as a container so the main "php" binary isn't overwritten.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted the latest article in their Jenkins + PHP tutorial series (part four) with a look at some other useful plugins for use in your projects.

In the previous articles in this series, we set up Jenkins and our project and did an analysis of the first few builds. So far, we have seen interesting results come back regarding the quality of our project. In this article, we are going to take a look at some more tools and plugins which we can use for inspecting the front end assets.

The list includes tools for evaluating a wide range of technologies involved in web development like:

• CSSLint
• JSHint
• Open tasks (aka @todo)

Each tool has an example of what the output looks like and how to integrate it into the Phing build and in the Jenkins setup.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted the latest part in their Jenkins+PHP series today. In this new article (the final part in the series) they use the Jenkins setup they've walked you through already and actually run the analysis on the PHP project and the resulting information.

The results of Jenkins come from different tools and will be placed in different locations within the Jenkins GUI. [...] Within this article, we will be going through each tool and have a look at what it reports back to us. In the end, we will also look at some extra details Jenkins collects for us. Since we build the same project several times, we will get straight lines within our graphs. In a real project, the graph would fluctuate.

He goes through some examples of the results from his analysis including screenshots and explanations for:

• PHP_CodeSniffer
• PHP MD (Mess Detector)
• PHP CPD (Copy & Paste Detector)
• PHP Depend
• PHPLOC (Lines Of Code)
• PHPUnit
• PHPDox

He also briefly mentions the "changes" information, showing you what changed in that particular build to help narrow down any issues that might have come up.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted the first part of a new series of articles showing you how to use (and secure) Jenkins, the popular continuous integration tool, to bring more quality to your PHP-based applications.

Earlier this year, I wrote an article about PHP-CI, which you can use as a continuous integration tool for your PHP projects. Within this article I indicated I still liked Jenkins the most as a CI tool. Time to dive into Jenkins and see how we can set this up for our PHP project.

In this first part of the series helps you get Jenkins installed via a package and configure it on the server. He then gets into the steps to secure the installation: configuring users, turning off signups and the type of security to set up (they choose matrix-based). He wraps up the article with a look at installing some useful plugins and using a template to use as a base for setting up your projects.

Ben Ramsey has posted a complete walk-through of setting up and configuring Jenkins on an AWS instance for testing your PHP applications.

One of my first tasks at ShootProof was to set up a Jenkins server for continuous integration and get it ready to run unit tests for PHP and JavaScript code. There are plenty of tutorials around the web to help you do just that. This is yet another one, but it’s primarily my cleaned-up notes -and less of a tutorial - placed here for my future self to find and provided publicly for all to benefit. These instructions are specifically tailored for setting up Jenkins on an Amazon Linux EC2 instance.

While he doesn't call it a "tutorial" it's still a great step-by-step guide to the things you'll need and the process to follow including commands, installing and starting Jenkins and configuring the environment to execute your tests. The main goal was to set it up for PHP-based applications, but he also throws in the setup of some Javascript testing via Node.js and the PhantomJS/CasperJS combo.

The latest post to the SensioLabs Insight blog today shows you how you can integrate the service with Jenkins as a part of your pre-existing continuous integration workflow.

One of the main features of SensioLabsInsight service is that it integrates smoothly into your existing workflow and technical infrastructure. We know that most companies use Jenkins as their continuous integration server and for that reason, SensioLabsInsight provides out-of-the-box Jenkins integration.

The integration uses the Insight API to perform the checks and return a report of the results. They step you through the process to get the connection set up (using the API client) and send the request for processing. The result is returned in PMD format, something Jenkins can easily parse and integrate into the pass/fail of the job. You can also get the details of the issues including error message, file location and the priority of the issue.