Skip to main content

Continuous Integration with Jenkins and Git

http://jenkins-ci.org/
Jenkins is a free and open source solution for monitoring the execution of jobs, including software project builds.

By monitoring the outcome of a build you are able to provide continuous quality control throughout the development period of a project.  The aim is to reduce the effort required in quality control at the end of development by  consistently applying small amounts of effort to quality throughout the development cycle.

Under the continuous integration (CI) model developers should consistently integrate their development efforts into the repository.  There should be time delay between committing code changes and the new build - this allows developers to recognize and correct potential problems immediately.  Of course measures must be in place to flag errors with the build.

The advantage to developers and project managers to having a stable repository to which commits are made and tested are multiple.  I don't need to replicate the Wikipedia list here but suffice to say that I've found although development is slowed slightly by needing to correct bugs (lol!) the overall quality of code is improved.  A drawback that is mentioned on Wikipedia and actually made itself very apparent to me immediately is the need for a good test suite.  You should expect to either assign a developer to coding unit tests or to allocate time for developers to code these as part of their development cycle.

If you're running Ubuntu installing Jenkins is very easy - a version is included in the repositories and so can be installed with apt-get.  There is an excellent resource at that guides you through the installation of Jenkins at rdegges.com that will help you get started.  I personally found the Jenkins site itself slightly lacking in documentation aimed at first time users, but there is a large community base of users for support. There is a good tutorial for setting up PHP projects here.

Just by the way, the JAVA_HOME variable should be set to /usr/lib/jvm/default-java on Debian distro's.  This is a symbolic link to the currently installed JVM.

Installing PHPUnit

In case you struggle to install PHPUnit you should have a look at this bug comment on Launchpad which will help to solve the known "coverage" bug in Ubuntu installs.  The following steps are given (and work) to install phpunit on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get remove phpunit
sudo pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
sudo pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com
sudo pear channel-discover components.ez.no
sudo pear update-channels
sudo pear upgrade-all
sudo pear install --alldeps phpunit/PHPUnit
Note that I have omitted the last step of the process given on the web which installs phpunit again with apt-get.  This breaks the installation because the new version of PHPUnit is incompatible with the CodeCoverage filter and you will get this error: PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined method PHP_CodeCoverage_Filter::getInstance() in /usr/bin/phpunit on line 39


If you follow the steps given above and install phpunit with pear you should be okay :-)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Separating business logic from persistence layer in Laravel

There are several reasons to separate business logic from your persistence layer.  Perhaps the biggest advantage is that the parts of your application which are unique are not coupled to how data are persisted.  This makes the code easier to port and maintain. I'm going to use Doctrine to replace the Eloquent ORM in Laravel.  A thorough comparison of the patterns is available  here . By using Doctrine I am also hoping to mitigate the risk of a major version upgrade on the underlying framework.  It can be expected for the ORM to change between major versions of a framework and upgrading to a new release can be quite costly. Another advantage to this approach is to limit the access that objects have to the database.  Unless a developer is aware of the business rules in place on an Eloquent model there is a chance they will mistakenly ignore them by calling the ActiveRecord save method directly. I'm not implementing the repository pattern in all its glory in this demo.  

Fixing puppet "Exiting; no certificate found and waitforcert is disabled" error

While debugging and setting up Puppet I am still running the agent and master from CLI in --no-daemonize mode.  I kept getting an error on my agent - ""Exiting; no certificate found and waitforcert is disabled". The fix was quite simple and a little embarrassing.  Firstly I forgot to run my puppet master with root privileges which meant that it was unable to write incoming certificate requests to disk.  That's the embarrassing part and after I looked at my shell prompt and noticed this issue fixing it was quite simple. Firstly I got the puppet ssl path by running the command   puppet agent --configprint ssldir Then I removed that directory so that my agent no longer had any certificates or requests. On my master side I cleaned the old certificate by running  puppet cert clean --all  (this would remove all my agent certificates but for now I have just the one so its quicker than tagging it). I started my agent up with the command  puppet agent --test   whi

Redirecting non-www urls to www and http to https in Nginx web server

Image: Pixabay Although I'm currently playing with Elixir and its HTTP servers like Cowboy at the moment Nginx is still my go-to server for production PHP. If you haven't already swapped your web-server from Apache then you really should consider installing Nginx on a test server and running some stress tests on it.  I wrote about stress testing in my book on scaling PHP . Redirecting non-www traffic to www in nginx is best accomplished by using the "return" verb.  You could use a rewrite but the Nginx manual suggests that a return is better in the section on " Taxing Rewrites ". Server blocks are cheap in Nginx and I find it's simplest to have two redirects for the person who arrives on the non-secure non-canonical form of my link.  I wouldn't expect many people to reach this link because obviously every link that I create will be properly formatted so being redirected twice will only affect a small minority of people. Anyway, here's