Continuous integration with Travis and CakePHP

I must admit that I only recently started to take testing more seriously.
In the past, I just created tests if too much time was available.

But the larger projects get, the more just minor changes will most likely break other pieces in them, as well.
Most of the time you don’t even realize it until it is too late, and people report it broken after deployment.
To avoid this, it is wise to have a good test coverage of your project.
Also, it helps to have some software that tests your projects continuously and automatically. This is where Jenkins or Travis come into play.

In the following tutorial, I want to focus on how use the free Travis CI to automatically test your GitHub repositories automatically after every commit.
Jenkins you would have to manually set up on your server. Travis is already available with only some minor configuration (for free repos anyway).

Note: For Jenkins, there is some documentation in the cookbook.

Travis Setup

You need to get a Travis account first. The easiest way would be to sign in with your Github account as this automatically sets everything up. Then you just need to enable the GitHub repositories you want to be tested.

Github Setup

On Github, you also need to enable the corresponding "Travis hook" for your repositories. It will also need the token you can get from the Travis settings page.

Then we need to make our ".travis.yml" configuration file. The documentation is pretty good, but I will still outline the major pitfalls.
A basic version to test your "YourPluginRepository" plugin code for PHP5.3 and PHP5.4 would be sth. like this:

language: php
 
php:
  - 5.3
  - 5.4

before_script:
  - git clone --depth 1 git://github.com/cakephp/cakephp ../cakephp && cd ../cakephp
  - mv ../YourPluginRepository plugins/YourPlugin
  - sh -c "mysql -e 'CREATE DATABASE cakephp_test;'"
  - chmod -R 777 ../cakephp/app/tmp
  - echo "<?php
    class DATABASE_CONFIG {
    public \$test = array(
      'datasource' => 'Database/Mysql',
      'database' => 'cakephp_test',
      'host' => '0.0.0.0',
      'login' => 'travis',
      'persistent' => false,
    );
    }" > ../cakephp/app/Config/database.php
 
script:
  - ./lib/Cake/Console/cake test PluginName AllTests --stderr
  
notifications:
  email: false

Save this file to your repository root.
After the commit and push, Travis should be notified via hook and your first test build should already be in the queue there.
You can find it at

https://travis-ci.org/[YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME]/[YOUR_PROJECT_NAME]/

If you want to take a look at some more complex Travis setups, take a look at my tools plugin or the CakePHP repository. Both also use different CakePHP versions or database types.

Hooks

If you take a look at the Build-Lifecycle you can see that you have the possibility to install additional software/packages and configure your build to your liking prior to executing the tests.

Status image for your readme or website:

https://travis-ci.org/[YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME]/[YOUR_PROJECT_NAME].png

Current status for my tools plugin

That was actually the main reason I started to try out Travis. The plugin got larger and more and more apps started to use it. I had to start thinking about how to make it more stable and reliable, especially after modifying parts of it. Regression tests really help here a lot!

Just as an example image:

I noticed, however, that this image does not change very often. So if your build does not pass anymore, don’t rely on this image. Better use the notification hooks to get alerted 🙂

Sugar: Coverage via Coveralls

You can include coveralls.io coverage results and also get a detailed report for each class.
It is easiest to use the travis plugin then, as the coveralls setup is quite complicated otherwise.
See my Tools plugin on how to get it working.

You can show a neat little batch in your readme as well:

Note

It seems I wasn’t the only one writing something about this. Independently, Mark Story wrote an alternative article about the same topic.