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If you find yourself doing manual database schema changes or running your tests manually before updating your files (manually), think twice! With every additional manual task needed to deploy a new version of your app, the chances for potentially fatal mistakes increase. Whether you're dealing with a simple update, a comprehensive build process or even a continuous integration strategy, build automation is your friend.
Among the tasks you might want to automate are:
- Dependency management
- Compilation, minification of your assets
- Running tests
- Creation of documentation
- Packaging
- Deployment
Build tools can be described as a collection of scripts that handle common tasks of software deployment. The build tool is not a part of your software, it acts on your software from 'outside'.
There are many open source tools available to help you with build automation, some are written in PHP others aren't. This shouldn't hold you back from using them, if they're better suited for the specific job. Here are a few examples:
Phing is the easiest way to get started with automated deployment in the PHP world. With Phing you can control your packaging, deployment or testing process from within a simple XML build file. Phing (which is based on Apache Ant) provides a rich set of tasks usually needed to install or update a web app and can be extended with additional custom tasks, written in PHP.
Capistrano is a system for intermediate-to-advanced programmers to execute commands in a structured, repeatable way on one or more remote machines. It is pre-configured for deploying Ruby on Rails applications, however people are successfully deploying PHP systems with it. Successful use of Capistrano depends on a working knowledge of Ruby and Rake.
Dave Gardner's blog post PHP Deployment with Capistrano is a good starting point for PHP developers interested in Capistrano.
Chef is more than a deployment framework, it is a very powerful Ruby based system integration framework that doesn't just deploy your app but can build your whole server environment or virtual boxes.
Deployer is a deployment tool written in PHP, it's simple and functional. Runs tasks in parallel, atomic deployment, keeps consistency between servers. Recipes of common tasks for Symfony, Laravel, Zend Framework and Yii.
- Three part blog series about deploying a LAMP application with Chef, Vagrant, and EC2
- Chef Cookbook which installs and configures PHP and the PEAR package management system
- Chef video tutorial series
Continuous Integration is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at least daily — leading to multiple integrations per day. Many teams find that this approach leads to significantly reduced integration problems and allows a team to develop cohesive software more rapidly.
-- Martin Fowler
There are different ways to implement continuous integration for PHP. Travis CI has done a great job of making continuous integration a reality even for small projects. Travis CI is a hosted continuous integration service for the open source community. It is integrated with GitHub and offers first class support for many languages including PHP.