Andrew Johnstone has a new post to his blog with a look at using Vagrant for continuous deployment of a PHP-based application.

Vagrant is simply a wrapper around Virtualbox headless that allows for provisioning virtual machines with support for puppet, chef-solo, chef, and bash. This allows you to automate the deployment and sandboxing of development sites. Additional base box images can be found at vagrantbox.es.

He walks you through the full process of setting up a first deployment - getting Vagrant installed, updating the config for a squeeze64.box image, configuring a virtualhost on the Apache web server and setting up a "preinstall" script to configure things like MySQL and install a long list of packages (via apt-get).

On the Zend Developer Zone Kevin Schroeder has published the latest episode of the ZendCon Sessions series of podcasts (as recorded at the 2010 Zend/PHP Conference). The episode is Sebastian Bergmann's talk on continuous inspection and integration in PHP projects.

The ZendCon Sessions are live recordings of sessions that have been given at previous Zend Conferences. Combined with the slides, they can be the next best thing to having attended the conference itself. [...] This episode of The ZendCon Sessions was recorded live at ZendCon 2010 in Santa Clara, CA and features Sebastian Bergmann giving his talk: "Continuous Inspection and Integration of PHP Projects"

You can either listen via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3. His slides have also been posted to Slideshare so you can follow along.

In a recent post to his blog Clay Loveless looks at something he believes is important to create quality software in any organization - continuous deployment (CD).

I'm no continuous deployment expert, but it's gotten some attention after yesterday's highlight at an Etsy board meeting. Companies making the most of continuous deployment were designed to do so from the very early stages. [...] It takes a lot of discipline to implement all of the [testing methods and development cycles]. It takes even more to make sure that these kinds of processes get put in place early in a company's life.

The parts of a successful continuous deployment process include unit testing, a controlled feature cycle, black box testing and good instrumentation to keep track of it all. Clay wonders why, when there's so many tools and information out there about CD, companies still wouldn't implement it. He notes that putting it in after the fact is very rare and is usually avoided by the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality.

Sebastian Bergmann has a new post to his blog today talking about the Jenkins template he's put together to help PHP projects get started quickly with the popular continuous integration tool (formerly Hudson).

Most web applications are changed and adapted quite frequently and quickly. Their environment, for example the size and the behaviour of the user base, are constantly changing. What was sufficient yesterday can be insufficient today. Especially in a web environment it is important to monitor and continuously improve the internal quality not only when developing, but also when maintaining the software.

The Template for Jenkins project gives you a standard template to build off of when setting up your environment. It includes links to the required plugins, the needed PHP tools (installed via PEAR) and the build configuration files. At the end, there's also a bit on how to get it all installed and configured. There's even a few screenshots to help you be sure things look okay.

In this new post to his blog Volker Dusch gives you a quick guide to setting up Jenkins (formerly Hudson) for your continuous integration environment.

So for me it was time to update [my guide], especially because you now get even more features and nice graphs and some issues have been resolved. If you followed the old tutorial i recommend you create a new job now.. but i'm getting ahead of my self.

He introduces the idea of continuous integration and how it can help your code and development team do an even better job. He chose Jenkins for the example because it's dead simple to setup and get running with the PHP-related plugins needed. He gives you the steps you'll need to get it installed (on Ubuntu) and a sample application that you can run unit tests on to see the results.

In another of his "Twitter Asks" series of posts, Chris Hartjes takes a look at continuous integration in PHP applications and some of his choices/personal preferences when it comes to the technology to use.

For those not familiar with the concept of Continuous Integration, I can sum it up with one very glib phrase: it lets you break your code before you buy it. By this I mean, when combined with other programming practices like automated deployment and Test Driven Development, you get a chance to see if the code you've written *today* breaks anything you wrote *yesterday*.

He points out some of the major advantages to having a continuous integration (CI) system set up for your application or site including the biggest - knowing your code is broken before it even gets released. He talks about various deployment/CI tools he's seen including phpUnderControl, Xinc and Hudson (with his preference falling on the last). He doesn't get into the setup of the tools much - each application's setup is different anyway - but he does give an overview of how the process flows in his sample build. One of the keys is having good tests to support the application. Only with those set up will you know when things are badly broken.

On the Ibuildings techPortal there's a new tutorial from Ben Longden about setting up Hudson as a continuous integration server for the deployment of your application(s). Tools like Hudson allow you to create consistent builds and automatically handle tasks that might get overlooked by a person doing the deployment.

Continuous integration (CI) is fast becoming part of the standard development model for creating high quality software, and rightly so. Delivering reliably high quality software is in the best interest of yourself, your manager and your clients. This is not an article about Continuous Integration itself, but will introduce Hudson, a key tool, and may help you to implement your own CI strategy.

He talks about one of the most important aspects of continuous integration - unit testing - and how the popular PHPUnit tool easily integrates as a part of a Hudson build. The automation it allows lets you constantly run tests, helping you catch issues before they make it to the live site. He walks you through the install of Hudson, Xdebug, PHPUnit and Ant - all of the tools you'll need for the basic setup. He includes instructions for configuring these tools to work together and some additional tools you can layer on top (like the PHP Mess Detector, PHPCodeSniffer and the PHP Copy and Paste Detector).

After asking for topics to blog about on Twitter, Chris Hartjes has posted the first response to the suggestions - a look at continuous integration (CI) in PHP environments.

For those not familiar with the concept of Continuous Integration, I can sum it up with one very glib phrase: it lets you break your code before you buy it. [...] If I were to design a Continuous Integration (hereafter referred to as CI) system, what would it look like?

His requirements include version control integration, easy unit test execution, a web interface and be able to automate it all at a moment's notice. He talks about the importance of unit testing in CI and the tools that are available for the job like phpUnderControl, Xinc and Hudson. He also looks at the build process, from check-in through a successful build result and how he handles bugs when they do pop up.

In the latest post to his blog Chris Hartjes talks about how he got python and PHP working together as a part of his testing with Hudson.

These days, it's becoming increasingly harder to find web applications that are homogenous in terms of the tools they use to Get Things Done. [...] Loosely coupled components, passing messages to each other, is great architecture to try and build if you have both the skills and patience to make it work.

His technique combines the testing of PHPUnit for PHP with the Py.test functionality for Python with the continuous integration tool Hudson to run them both as a part of the same build process.

On the Ibuildings blog today there's a new post from Soila Patajoki about a white papers they've developed covering continuous integration and how it relates to PHP applications.

This new white paper discusses the policies and systems that together make up Continuous Integration. It explains how Continuous Integration can allow your teams to build projects faster and cheaper, and also covers several best of breed tools for PHP-based companies to use to implement such a system.

The PDF download is free, but you'll need to give up a little personal information to get to it. The white papers covers topics like source code control, regression testing and tools like PHPUnit, Phing and phpDocumentor.