HOWTO: Continuous Integration for PHP, pt. 3
This is the third article in my series about continuous integration for PHP. You might want to read the first and second article prior to this.
In this article I want to introduce you to the way I run the continuous integration tests, what to run when, and where. If you're unsure how to write unittests, this will not be covered in this article but phpunit.de has an excellent documentation section just covering how to write tests. Another section is there covering how to write tests for SeleniumRC.
Let me start this article with a short summary of what we have installed in the second part: We have a pretty standard LAMP server based on Ubuntu Linux. Then there is PHPUnit for unit and regression testing as well as phing, our integration server. We added SeleniumRC as a frontend test tool, then Xvfb and Firefox to facilitate the frontend tests. xdebug is used by PHPUnit for code coverage reports and phpDocumentor will be used by phing for automatic APIdoc generation.
A Subversion client to fetch latest updates out of the repository completes the setup.
Ok, let's dig a little deeper into the filesystem structure and how to use it, shall we?
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?
Welcome!
Hey! I'm glad you could make it.
Here I keep posting my latest experiences, but also technical oddities and curiosities as well as random thoughts and ramblings.
All of it will be related to the IT industry and me in it.
My thought cloud
Entries by topic
- Agile (14)
- Commerce (1)
- Events (3)
- General (8)
- Management (7)
- PHP (3)
- Social Web (2)
- Test Automation (5)
Events Calendar
Pages
Other places to find me
Xing Profile