My copy of Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More by Kevin McArthur has already been worth the money I spent on it.

In our, albeit slow, upgrade to more modern development practices (code version and unit testing being the last elements on my list), I was particularly fearful of code versioning namely concerning issues of automating a build process to export a copy of the repository to our shared development server, or just have a local server installed for everyone one.

However Chapter 8 has pointed me to two programs that I sincerely regret not having heard of until now: Phing and Xinc.

Phing is a build system written in PHP that works extremely well with PHP and PHPUnit. You can configure your own build targets, for example like “get” (SVN update essentially), “test” (run PHPUnit or any other unit testing), “try” (copy to a development server), and “deploy” (copy to your live server).

Xinc is a continuous integration server. Essentially, it monitors an SVN repo and performs a user defined action (usually running a phing buildscript) on any changes to the repo. Which is awesome because its solves the issue of updating the dev server. Having Xinc run a > phing try on SVN updates is exactly what we need! I’m even having delusions of grandeur of having it monitor tags for doing live deployments as well.

Don’t take my word as gospel, I haven’t actually installed and tested these systems out, but when I do you can rest assured I will be writing about it.