Ben Cornwell

Lately I’ve been doing some work with PHPUnderControl. It’s based on the Cruise Control Continuous Integration framework, which in turn, is based on Ant. It combines PHPUnit, PHPDocumentor & CodeSniffer to build & test software projects. It works pretty well, though there were a few mysteries along the way to getting an install up and running. I’m in the middle of preparing a comprehensive how-to, but meanwhile, here are a few notes I made about the installation & configuration process.

* There’s no easy way to start and stop Cruise Control. You’ll need to add an init script for starting/stopping/restarting. I’ll post mine here eventually.

* Disc Space: Builds can potentially use up a ton of the stuff. Make sure you have plenty of room, and/or, an easy way to shutdown the CC process if you find yourself running out of disc space.

* Configuration changes require a restart/reload to take affect. This should be second-nature if you’re used to configuring apache etc. Having said this, it caught me out a couple of times.

* You can configure builds to be triggered only where code changes have been merged to your svn sources. This saves heaps of unnecessary disc writing etc.

* Be careful using relative file paths. I’m still looking into how Ant handles file paths, but it definitely seems to be inconsistent. I’m using absolute paths in my build.xml & config.xml config files.

* If commands in your build process are failing, check the contents of /path/to/cruisecontrol/cruisecontrol.log - This will detail the exact commands being run by cruisecontrol.

* To test your build.xml configuration for a specific project run /path/to/cruisecontrol/apacheAnt-Version/bin/ant from within the project directory. Do this before restarting the cruisecontrol process to avoid builds failing because config errors.