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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-19T17:16:16+00:00

I’d like to ask about real life experiences with release management of PHP projects

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I’d like to ask about real life experiences with release management of PHP projects over Hudson CI server.

Our projects are separated into subprojects: frontends, framework, libraries. Everything is stored in our SVN as project of its own. Different frontends may depend on different versions of framework which itself depends on different versions of libraries.

So far we do release management by hand. We have one environment serving as test and production to avoid environment differences problems releasing the project. We tag each subproject in SVN with release number and checkout everything for testing accessible under test domain. Once we do testing and fix the bugs we tag new versions of everything in SVN as production and relink production domain to point to the new code. This manual process has its obvious problems and there is no way we are keeping it.

Under my research to move to automated solution I already installed Hudson and configured it for PHP projects (Phing, ppUnit, etc…) I am familiar with writing build scripts under Phing or Ant. I red all possible “the basics” stuff of setting up CI environment and preparing project and done that. What I did not find is an example of release management similar to what we do manually taking into account all the dependencies we have. Can you please point me out into a right direction?

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  1. Editorial Team

    I’m afraid there is no such complex thing readily available. We had to solve quite similar problem and we ended up using very similar configuration you were planning to use (or already using).

    We have multiple application cores and then specific client modifications on top of that. All is stored in SVN. Additionally we use svn:externals to link Framework and other 3rd party libraries with the application.

    All is done using Phing and although it took us some time, Phing helped a lot and I can really recommend it.

    Client specific addons are fetched automatically using phing. Everything is configurable through build properties.

    For database schema updates we are very happy with dbdeploy which is a part of Phing. Although we had to modify it slightly for our needs.

    Additionally we added a support for creating pre-configured self-extracting Linux installer so the whole complicated process of creating a deployable package consists of calling one phing target and passing a correct build property file. To create those installers we use this simple technique (http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1005818).
    Again using Phing the created package is automatically uploaded to a target server, executed over SSH to do the deploy.

    Then we use Hudson for automatically creating installer packages (in addition to automatically running phpunit tests and Selenium/Hmres tests) and storing them in a defined location/or as artifacts. Our support team can then grab the packages and do the production deployment themselves (our QA/Test environments are updated automatically by Hudson).

    Additionally the code is automatically encoded and licensed using ZendGuard where necessary.

    The brief description above is just to illustrate what can be achieved using Hudson, Phing, SVN and PHP. Full technical details would obviously be too long for this post but I would be happy to elaborate more somewhere else.

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