In introduces you to using TravisCI to provide continuous integration services for your project (externally). Continuous integration is a way to provide "quality control" of your code, making it easier to run testing, check syntax and more, small pieces at a time.

Travis CI in fact works by tying itself to a particular project on Github, and by triggering a new build every time new commits are available on the chosen branch (master, usually). Your build shows up on the main page along with all the other projects in the newsfeed, so try to maintain it green. :) Travis CI adds this other aspect to Github's social coding.

He talks a bit about how it works - builds running on VMs, some with advanced tools like Selenium - and includes an example based off a simple travis.yml file defining a script to run pre-build. He also points out a special caveat about databases - they support things like MySQL, Sqlite, MongoDB and CouchDB, but you'll have to generate them from scratch every time, sample data and all.

Henrik Bjørnskov has a quick new post today showing how to combine two powerful technologies into a simple, configurable autoload system in a Symfony Travis-CI build with Composer.

To integrate your project with travis the only thing necesarry is to have a .travis.yml file and a working PHPUnit test setup like http://github.com/simplethings/SimpleThingsFormExtraBundle. Where the Tests/vendors.php script is executed before the tests are perfomed. But it would be way cooler to just have Composer handle the autoloading and dependencies.

A sample .travis.yml file is included in the post (also here) as well as instructions for grabbing dependencies and including the autoload process in your application's bootstrap.

In a new post to his blog Lukas Smith looks at a recently introduced service, Travis CI that helps make continuous integration simple (and without having to set up the software yourself). He talks about his experiences in getting his trial project up and working with their system.

Continuous integration is one of these topics that had a slow start, but in recent years has really taken off. The slow start is likely to be attributed to the fact that it was perceived as hard to setup and maintain. But solutions around Jenkins and Sismo are making it easier and easier. But thanks to the new Travis CI service, its now essentially so easy that there is no excuse not to use CI for PHP projects, at least if you are hosting your OSS code on github.com. What makes this service so crazy cool is that you can run your tests against multiple PHP versions, multiples databases (heck even RabbitMQ) and against multiple versions of various libraries.

Thanks to the "first class" PHP support they offer, setting up a PHP project is as simple as creating a ".travis.yml" file in your github-based project (including PHP versions to test against, dependency management and "before script" tasks to execute). If you're looking for a CI platform without a lot of the hassle involved in the usual setup, you'd do well to check out Travis CI.

You can also see another example of a project setup in this post from Travis Swicegood.