Pavel Shevaev has put together what he calls "yet another Ant alternative" - a tool written in PHP to create project related tasks in a style that matches the Ant and rake methods.

There is a lib-taskman project on the google code hosting where you can find the full documentation, sources and latest releases. It's probably not that elegant as rake but if you want to stick to PHP and have Ant-alike functionality without any XML programming then taskman may turn out to be handy. taskman is very simple to use, it requires only one include, all its code resides in one PHP file, and it has no external dependencies.

He includes a basic use example that sets up the build with "task_hello", "task_comma", "task_world" and "task_say" methods that each do some basic output to show the flow of the process. He also gives examples of possible uses for the tasks like database bootstrapping, auto-code generation, project deployment, etc. He also mentions two other PHP-based projects that do similar things - pake and Phake.

Alexey Zakhlestins has posted about a build system created by developers of the Symfony framework as PHP's answer to Make and Rake - Pake.

Often, while working on software projects, one finds, that there are repetitive tasks, which would be much easier to deal with, if automated. In the C/Unix world, this task is often solved by Make, Java programmers prefer Apache Ant, Ruby programmers use Rake. The fact, which is not commonly known, is, that PHP also has such instrument, and it is called Pake. It was originally created by authors of Symfony framework. Unfortunately, they never wrote any documentation, which killed adoption rates.

He shows what a sample "Pakefile.php" file might look like and links to the github page for his revamp of the project to add a few more helpers. You can also install it as a PEAR pacakge.

Matthias Willerich has posted a very complete guide to deploying PHP applications from a subversion repository with Vlad the Deployer (a Ruby-based deployment engine).

In my current day job I have to deploy a number of web apps every few weeks. The person I took over from did the whole thing in a manual and terribly cumbersome way. [...] In the following article, I'm going to describe how I went from there to deploying my Zend Framework-driven PHP apps with Vlad. To save yourself some time, feel free to skip the back story, the pre-requisite of installing ruby, gem and rake, or go straight to the deployment recipes.

He wanted a setup that would allow a "one-liner" for deployment, the ability to roll back and to have shares resources between releases. He walks you through the setup of all needed components, the configuration options and some example runs of his build/deploy process.