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.

Mike Willbanks as put together a new post talking about continuous integration with Atlassian's Bamboo software and getting it to cooperate with the needed PHP tools to round out your deployment (like PHP Depend, PHP Code Sniffer, PHP Mess Detector and PHPUnit).

Continuous integration is all the rage these days; you are unit testing your code are you not? During some consulting in January with the help of Sebastian Bergmann, from thePHP.cc, we setup continuous integration utilizing Atlassian Bamboo and received training on PHPUnit. Using Atlassian Bamboo for continuous integration will take you a bit to setup, however, I have found it to be an invaluable tool when utilizing the Atlassian stack (JIRA, Confluence, Crucible, Bamboo and Crowd).

He walks you through the process of getting the PHP tools installed (from PEAR packages) and includes links to two Bamboo plugins to help gather some metrics on the deployment process. He talks about the actual build tool (they went with ant), setting up the locations for where output and external dependencies will be stored and includes the ant build.xml file they use to tie it all together.

Benjamin Eberlei has a new post to his blog today pointing you to some PHP & Hudson CI integration resources that can help you get this powerful combination up and running for your deployment process.

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.

He moved away from his own bash script-based CI setup towards something a bit more technical, something that would give him a bit more control over running unit tests, create code coverage, etc. He lists three sites that helped him get his Hudson install up and running and another is mentioned in the comments.

Ladislav Prskavec has posted a step-by-step guide on getting Hudson (a Java-based continuous integration server) working with PHP.

Hudson is extensible continuous integration engine used for Java projects. It's architecture can be used for others languages as PHP too.

The guide links you to the files and packages you'll need to get PHP support installed (including a few different plugins), a sample build script for a build tool like Phing and an example Hudson configuration to tie them together. The Phing process is executed in a shell to run unit tests, build documentation and check the syntax on all files in the current repository.

Davide Mendolia wrote in to let me know about a new site he's started to gather as much information about continuous integration in PHP into once place as he can - PHP-CI.net.

The goal of this website is to provide information for doing continuous integration in PHP and also hosting of continuous integration process for open source software. [...] On this site you will find information about continuous integration in PHP, be able to ask an hosting of your project and consult the result of the execution of builds of project hosted.

You can also check out the blog for the project to get the latest updates on hosted projects (like their first - PHPIDS) and the Google Group he's set up for discussion.

On the Ibuildings techPortal site today there's a new tutorial from Marc that introduces the phpUnderControl continuous integration system for PHP projects.

In any decent sized project, the more times you commit code, the bigger the chance is that you will break something. [...] To deal with this we can either adopt the 'śrelease and pay'ť method of software control, or we can setup systems to help us find the consequences of our actions, so we that can correct them before they become a problem. We usually call these systems Continuous Integration systems.

He briefly covers what phpUnderControl is and what it can do for you before getting into the real detail - grabbing all the needed packages (including the eZ components graphing library), setting the system up and configuring it for a sample project. This includes setting up the XML configuration file and adding in PhpDocumentor/PHPUnit/PhpCodeSniffer. He adds in two "nice things to have" at the end - emailing when something breaks and setting up/tearing down a database as needed.

Stefan Koopmanschap has posted about his plugin he's created for the symfony framework that would allow it to handle continuous integration natively - symfonyUndercontrol

From the first moment I was introduced to the concept of continuous integration I have been really interested in this. I've been playing with several packages for CI and set them up for fun. One thing that kept bothering me was that I could not test my own symfony projects with it. I started working on the symfonyUnderControlPlugin a few months ago, and quickly had a working proof of concept. It wasn't perfect, but it did the job.

Strapped for time, he didn't get much chance to work on it until the company he works for (Ibuildings) gave them time to work on Open Source projects. The results is his preview release, version 0.0.1.

Michael Kimsal has put together a small page to help you get started using the phpUnderControl continuous integration system:

If you're not using phpUnderControl, you owe it to yourself to check it out, as I think 'continuous integration' will likely change the way you think of development. I've used CruiseControl in the past for PHP, but the PHP-specifics phpUnderControl brings to the project are too much to pass up.

The page mentions some of the common issues you might have in getting started - installation problem, the use of the PHP Code Sniffer and the Project Mess Detector from PHPUnit.

Raphael Stolt, with some time on his hands, set up a local copy of Xinc, the "shiny new Continuous Integration(CI) server" as hosted on the Google code site and spent some time working with it:

Since then the idea of building a Growl publisher plugin for Xinc was traveling my mind repeatedly, so the following post will break this circle and show a possible approach to build such a plugin, which can be used to notify the build result for continuously integrated projects and thereby provide an on-point/immediate feedback.

He includes the plugin class (ready for cut&paste) as well as the task definition and how to hook it all in to the Xinc build system. There's also a little example of it in action - a happy/sad indicator showing if the build failed or was a success, right there on the desktop.

The Xinc project has released the latest version of their application - 1.0:

The Xinc team are proud to announce the release of Xinc 1.0. Xinc is a free open source continuous integration tool written in PHP 5. It currently supports Subversion and Phing but is extensible to work with any version control or build tool. Xinc is released under an LGPL license.

You can find out more about this library on its new home on Google Code including documentation and two example projects to learn from. You can download this latest version here.