Tag: PHPUnit

The Toolchain: First Pass

Nick Jackson / / Development

Today I’ve been kicking around the ICT office with Alex, figuring out how to make Jenkins (our wonderful CI server) build and publish the latest version of the CWD with all the bells and whistles like compilation of CSS using LESS, minification, validation of code and so-on. As part of this we managed to fix a couple of bits and pieces which had been bugging me for a while, namely the fact that GitHub commit notifications weren’t working properly (fixed by changing the repository URI in the configuration) and the fact that Campfire integration wasn’t working (fixed by hitting it repeatedly with a hammer).

This brought me to thinking about how our various things tie in together, so I set about charting a few of them up. After a while I realised the chart had basically expanded into a complete flowchart of the various tools and processes that hang together to keep the code flowing in a steady stream from my brain – via my fingers – into an actual deployment on the development server. Since it may be of interest to some of you, here’s a pretty picture:

This is (approximately) the toolchain I currently use for Orbital, including rough details of what is being passed around

The beauty of this is that the vast majority of the lines happen completely by themselves — I get to spend my days living in the small bubble of my local development server and dipping in and out of Pivotal Tracker to update stories. The rest is magically happening as I work, and the constant feedback through all our monitoring and planning systems (take a look at SplendidBacon for an epic high-level overview) means that the rest of the project team and any project clients can see what’s going on at any time.

Jenkins, build my software!

Nick Jackson / / Development

Orbital is going to be a big bit of software, with lots of things doing lots of other things. A big part of putting together such a large bit of software – alongside our Pivotal Tracker instance – is the regular process of ‘building’ the software from source code into something that can actually be used, testing it and getting it onto our development servers so that we can actually see what it’s doing. As part of Orbital we’re taking a step into what is a relatively unexplored frontier for the development team here at Lincoln – Continuous Integration.

Continuous Integration means that as we develop our software it’s constantly being built, tested and deployed to make sure that it’s behaving as expected. We’re using the popular Jenkins server to manage everything that’s going on as part of this process, as well as provide reports on what’s happened. We’re slowly adding more things to the list of what’s actually happening when the magic starts, but here’s what we’re going to be doing by the end of the project every single time that somebody makes a change to our codebase:

  • Ensure that the source code is available from GitHub.
  • Invoke Phing to do all kinds of additional goodness as part of an automated build, including:
    • Run unit tests on our code using PHPUnit.
    • Verify that the code adheres to certain style standards (We use the CodeIgniter Style Guide) using PHP Code Sniffer. Specifically we’re using Thomas Ernest’s implementation of the guide.
    • Run a whole battery of analysis that looks for messy code structure and duplicate code.
    • Automatically build the technical documentation using DocBlox. This isn’t the end-user documentation, but it does tell us exactly what all our code is supposed to be doing so that we have a reference.
    • Perform token replacement on the resultant codebase. This means that we can keep the code repository clear of all environment and institution specific configuration, since these are replaced as we perform a build.
  • Deploy the built codebase to our development and testing platform so that we can actually use it.
  • Tell us the results of all of the above in a variety of pretty graphs and reports.

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