PHP Build system [closed]

Question

I'm using PHPUnderControl which runs on top of Cruise Control for my continuous integration and unit testing. I also have it setup to run PHPDocumentor to generate phpdoc's for me and it runs PHP Code Sniffer to enforce coding standards for me. But now I want to set up something on that same server (Ubuntu) to make deploying to a remote server easier. I already have it setup so after every successful build an SVN Export is done from trunk into a directory within the projects folder on the server.

I've been thinking of writing a little custom PHP script that will SSH to a configured remote server, tarball up the latest export, copy it over, untar and run any migrations. A PHP script like this shouldn't be too hard initially, unless I need to eventually begin scaling to multiple servers. I know there are systems out there like Phing, Fabric and others.

My question is if anyone has any experience with these and can provide some pro's and con's? I've begun setting up Phing on my server and will be trying Fabric next to play with them, but was wondering if anyone who has used them more extensively, or had to scale them, could provide some feedback.

Answer 1

I've used Capistrano with PHP (even though it's more of a Rails-y thing as it's written in Ruby).

It's been really straightforward to use, but that said I haven't had to scale much with it. We do deploy to various different staging/production servers though, and the multi-stage extension has been useful in those scenarios.

However like most things Ruby, there's a lot of hooks and "magic" which can get confusing if you're new to Capistrano and trying to do something tricky with it.

As for how it compares to other deployment tools, I can't comment. I know we used to use Phing, but I'm uncertain why we switched to Capistrano.

Answer 2

If you like Capistrano, but wished it was a bit more PHP'ish, check out Fredistrano.

I wrote an automated build (SVN export, Zend Guard encoding, etc) and deployment system using Phing once and found quite the pain to use. Whenever I had to write a special task I felt I had to jump through way to many hoops just to get it to work.

So, these days I just write simple bash scripts that does building with SVN checkout, encoding, creating a tag in SVN and deployment through rsync. It may be low-tech, and Phing may have some superior features, but atleast it doesn't get in my way.