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

HOWTO: Continuous Integration for PHP, pt. 2

This is the second in the series of articles on continuous integration for PHP. You might want to start reading the first article, covering the basic tools in the setup before you continue here.

Here I will give you a step-by-step guide how to set up a LAMP server with all the necessary tools to run a thorough set of tests and reports.

As of this writing Ubuntu Linux version 9.10 (Karmic Koala) has just been released. Personally I like Ubuntu for its ease of use, so this howto will focus on that. I assume that the general setup will be slightly different if you use another flavor of Linux, though.

If you don't have a spare computer lying around just yet, install VMWare Server. That will get you going well enough to convince your manager that a few hundred bucks for a medium-spec server will be well invested money.

This step of the tutorial assumes that you're at least somewhat familiar with the Linux command line. If you are not, do yourself a favor and get in touch with one of your system administrators. Make him understand what you want and convince him to divert from the typical company guidelines for server installation. You might want to show him this:

This will be a test server. It will not run in production. It will never be accessible by the public. It'll be a proof of concept and will be replaced by a server compliant to all guidelines once this proof of concept is approved by management.

For those of you who do this on their own: The above paragraph is for you. All aspects of creating a secure, well administered server with backup are ignored in this tutorial. Do not attempt to run this box online.

One more comment. Even if you're convinced that you'll not be using one of the packages or reports described below, just install them for now. The whole setup is well under 2GB and it works. Removing a package might break things.

This being said, are you ready for the installation?