Setting up a deployment / build / CI cycle for PHP projects

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I’ve been through buildbot, CruiseControl.net, CruiseControl and Hudson. All though I really liked CruiseControl*, it was just too much of a hassle with really complex dependency cases. buildbot is not easy to set up, but it’s got a nice aura (I just like python, that’s all). But hudson won over the former three because:

  1. It’s just easy to set up
  2. It’s easy to customize
  3. It looks good and got nice overview functionality
  4. It got point-and-click updates, for itself and all installed plugins. This is a really nice feature, that I appreciate more and more

Caveat: I only ever used linux as base for the above mentioned build servers (CC.net ran on mono), but they should all – according to the docs – run cross-platform.

Setting up a hudson server

Prerequisites:

  • Java (1.5 will serve you just fine)
  • Read access to the subversion server (I have a separate account for the hudson user)

From here, it’s just:

java -jar hudson.war

This will run a small server instance right off your console, and you should be able to browse the installation at your http://localhost:8080, if you don’t have anything else running on that port in advance (you can specify another port by passing the --httpPort=ANOTHER_HTTP_PORT option to the above command) and everything went well in the ‘installation’ process.

If you go to the available plugins directory (http://localhost:8080/pluginManager/available), you’ll find plugins for supporting your above mentioned tasks (subversion support is installed per default).

If that has whet you appetite, you should install a java application server, such as tomcat or jetty. Installation instructions are available for all major application servers

Update: Kohsuke Kawaguchi has constructed a windows service installer for hudson

Setting up a project in hudson

The links in the following walk-through assumes a running instance of hudson located at http://localhost:8080

  1. Select new Job (http://localhost:8080/view/All/newJob) from the menu on the left
  2. Give the job a name and tick Build a free-style software project on the list
  3. Pressing ‘ok’ will take you to the configuration page of the job. All the options have a little question mark besides them. Pressing this will bring up a help text regarding the option.
  4. Under the option group ‘Source Code Management’ you would be using Subversion. Hudson accepts both url access as well as local module access
  5. Under the option group ‘Build Triggers’, you would use ‘Poll SCM’. The syntax used here is that of cron, so polling the subversion repository every 5 minutes would be */5 * * * *
  6. The process of building the project is specified under the option group ‘Build’. If you already have an ant build file with all the targets you need, you’re in luck. Just choose ‘Invoke ant’ and write the name of the target. The option group supports maven and shell commands as well out of the box, but there is also a plugin available for phing.
  7. Tick off additional build actions in ‘Post Build Actions’, such as e-mail notifications or archiving of build artefacts.

For setting up processes for which hudson have no plugins, you can either call them directly through a shell script from within the build setup, or you could write you own plugin

Pitfalls:

  • If you have it produce build artefacts, remember to have hudson clean up after itself in regular intervals.
  • If you have more than 20 projects set up, consider not displaying their build status as the default main page on hudson

Good luck!

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