Setting up a deployment / build / CI cycle for PHP

Question

I am a lone developer most of my time, working on a number of big, mainly PHP-based projects. I want to professionalize and automate how changes to the code base are handled, and create a Continuous Integration process that makes the transition to work in a team possible without having to make fundamental changes.

What I am doing right now is, I have a local test environment for every project; I use SVN for each project; changes are tested locally, and then transferred to the on-line version, usually via FTP. API documentation is generated manually from the source code; Unit tests are something I am getting into slowly, and it's not yet part of my daily routine.

The "build cycle" I am envisioning would do the following:

• A changeset gets checked into SVN after having been tested locally.

• I start the build process. The SVN HEAD revision gets checked out, modified if necessary, and made ready for upload.

• API Documentation gets generated automatically - if I haven't set it up in detail yet, using a default template, scanning the whole code base.

• The new revision is deployed to the remote location via FTP (Including some directory renaming, chmodding, importing databases, and the likes.) This is something I already like phing for very much, but I'm open for alternatives of course.

• Unit tests residing in a predefined location are run. I am informed about their failure or success using E-Mail, RSS or (preferably) HTML output that I can grab and put into a web page.

• (optionally) a end-user "changelog" text file in a pre-defined location gets updated with a pre-defined part of the commit message ("It is now possible to filter for both "foo" and "bar" at the same time). This message is not necessarily identical with the SVN commit message, which probably contains much more internal information.

• Stuff like code metrics, code style checking and so on are not my primary focus right now, but on the long run, they certainly will. Solutions that bring this out-of-the-box are very kindly looked upon.

I am looking for

• Feedback and experiences from people who are or were in a similar situation, and have successfully implemented a solution for this

• Especially, good step-by-step tutorials and walkthroughs on how to set this up

• Solutions that provide as much automation as possible, for example by creating a skeleton API, test cases and so on for each new project.

and also

• Product recommendations. What I know so far is phing/ant for building, and phpUnderControl or Hudson for the reporting part. I like them all as far as I can see, but I have of course no detailed experience with them.

I am swamped with work, so I have a strong inclination towards simple solutions. On the other hand, if a feature is missing, I'll cry about it being too limited. :) Point-and-click solutions are welcome, too. I am also to commercial product recommendations that can work with PHP projects.

My setup

I am working on Windows locally (7, to be exact) and most client projects are run on a LAMP stack, often on shared hosting (= no remote SSH). I am looking for solutions that I can run in my own environment. I am ready to set up a Linux VM for this, no problem. Hosted solutions are interesting for me only if they provide all of the aspects described, or are flexible enough to interact with the other parts of the process.

Bounty I am accepting the answer that I feel will give me the most mileage. There is a lot of excellent input here, I wish I could accept more than one answer. Thanks everyone!

Answer 1

I would suggest using Jenkins http://jenkins-ci.org/ it's free and it's open source.

It's pretty straight forward to setup, works on multiple platforms and integrates well with other continuous integration tools like SonarQube (+ SQUALE) to measure technical debt and Thucydides for testing automation.

I would highly suggest using GIT or GIT Hub for version control instead of SVN. From my point of view it's just a better version control system that will help you scale your development efforts later.

Since you're working mostly with PHP project there are some other tools you can use.

PHPUnit - For unit testing

PHP CodeSniffer - Check for coding standards

PHP Depend - Shows your PHP code dependencies

XDEBUG - For performance testing

All of these tools and be triggered with a Jenkins job and helps with the quality and performance of your code.

Good luck and Enjoy!

Answer 2

I am mostly a sys admin but sometimes I code PHP as well. As a side project I created some scripts that will make it simple and painless to set up a full blown PHP CI environment using Jenkins. It also runs a sample project for you so you can see how each build step is configured.

If you want to try it out all you need is a Debian/Ubuntu box and shell access.

http://yauh.de/articles/379/setting-up-a-ci-environment-for-php-projects-using-jenkins-ci

Update To add some content to my answer:

You can simply set up a Jenkins CI for PHP using Ansible. Since v1.4 it supports roles which you can download from their galaxy.ansibleworks.com community site and it will do the heavy lifting for you. It is called jenkins-php.

Answer 3

I've recently begun the same kind of process, and am using Beanstalk for svn hosting.

There are two nifty features in the paid accounts (start at $15pm i think):

• deployment allows the user to create ftp targets for staging and production servers, which can be deployed at the click of a button (inc specifying a revision and branch)
• webhooks allow the user to set up a url that is called on each commit/deploy, passing across things like revision number, description and user. This could be used to update docs, run unit tests and update changelogs.

I'm sure there are other hosted or self-hosting svn servers with these two features, but beanstalk is the one i have experience of and it's working very, very well

There's also an API, which I imagine could be used to integrate deployment further in to your process.