Yesterday I finally had the time to setup my first continuous integration environment. Possible solutions for CI are phpUnderControl, Hudson or Arbit. Although phpUnderControl is the most wide-spread, but from I heard complex to setup/maintain, solution supposedly a hack and Arbit just in an early Alpha I decided to give Hudson a shoot. Another reason for this decision, I heard it has a simple plugin architecture and is easy to install and use. Additionally Hudson is easily integrated into Netbeans and Redmine, and I use both tools regularly in development.

My motivation to dive into CI is easily explained. I just never felt it was necessary to add a continuous integration enviroment to my projects, since I had one or two simple bash scripts that did the job. In general this is rather annoying, because they mostly only run PHPUnit and have to be done using a cronjob or manually, without any real process of notification. Additionally you have no way to navigate the test-results, code-coverage and no history of the last builds. For projects like Doctrine 2 we have the additional requirement to support 4 different database platforms, i.e. 4 different PHPUnit configurations. Currently that is solved by me using a Bash script that iterates over the configuration file names and invokes PHPUnit.

There are already some awesome sources how to get Hudson and PHP working. I'll list them here:

• Sebastian Bergmann's Howto in Screenshots
• David Luhman's series on PHP and Hudson
• Justin Palmers Guide to install PHP and Hudson (With Screenshots)

All those guides are already awesome and I would recommend choosing one of those to install Hudson, I think i can't add anything new to those. I have used Sebastians Howto, however i also like the third one. David Luhmans guide adds lots of details that are important to get the different parts of a build process to work.

Now what these tutorials all do is that they use a bash command to execute the build process or specifiy an Ant Build file. However there is also a Phing Build process plugin for Hudson that allows to specify the build.xml targets to execute in the process. From the "Available Plugins" list you can choose the "Phing plugin".

After installation you have to configure the Phing install. The Phing Plugin Wiki Page shows how to do this. You have to go to "Manage Hudson" => "Configure System" and look for Phing. There you find the dialog to configure your phing installations.

In the context of choosing a build script for your project you can now choose "Phing" instead of Ant:

You can enter the targets to build, for example on my local Hudson instance I only execute "test" for Doctrine 2, since I am not interested in the building and deployment onto the PEAR channel at this development stage.

From inside Netbeans you can then start builds by pointing to the Hudson instance. See this tutorial by one of the Hudson + Netbeans Developers. You can then start all the builds from inside Netbeans and be notified of the success or failure.