Dominique Stender A blog about my thoughts and experiences in Information Technology

HOWTO: Continuous integration for PHP, pt. 4

This is the fourth article in my series about continuous integration for PHP. You might want to read the first, second and third article prior to this.

We're getting closer and closer to full test automation and continuous integration. The last article introduced you to how to write PHPUnit tests for SeleniumRC so that we can test website frontends through PHPUnit. After that we wrote our own phing build script that ran our backend as well as the frontend tests automatically, generated an code coverage report based on Xdebug as well as an comprehensive APIDoc based on PHPDoc comments.

The phing build script we used for this - test.xml - was executed manually by calling

phing -f test.xml

on the command line. Everything happened on the development virtual host.

The next logical step is to automate this and perform the additional tasks required to run continuous integration.

The first step is to do a manual svn checkout on the integration virtual host, so we have setup that is identical to the development virtual host.

Now, what the automation will have to do is a Subversion update of the integration virtual host in order to retrieve the latest copy. If the revision changes in that process (that is, if we indeed fetched newer files from Subversion) we again run the tests and generate the reports. If all tests succeed we can safely assume that we have a running system, and we can decide to create a tarball from it or update the staging system for our project manager / client to check it out. On the other hand, if a test fails we'd like to be notified by email.

This is exactly what a second phing build script will do.