Manuel Pichler

Today I have released phpUnderControl version 0.5.1. It's a bug fix release that closes several issues open since a long time. First of all I would like to thank Sebastian Marek who was the main contributor to this releases, so a big thankyou to you.

• Now phpUnderControl should work with CruiseControl 2.8.3. Thanks to Mike van Riel who provided some hints on this issue in a blog comment.
• Fixed #983: Graph unitests throw fatal error when ezComponents not available.
• Fixed #966: phpcs-details.xsl not showing file name.
• Closed #863: Destination option is now deprecated.
• Fixed #862: Command line switches without parameter don't work.
• Fixed #861: Password is used as username in check outs. This patch was supplied by Thorsten Daners via e-mail.
• Fixed #734: Now the build dropdown redirects to the correct build uri.
• Implemented #703: PHPUnit test results are now the first entry on the project overview page.
• Fixed #700: Throw an exception when the specified project does not exist.
• Implemented #675: Use "php -l" for lint checking and not PHPUnit.
• Implemented #625: Integrate PHP_Depend results.

Beside the new release some more things have changed. From now on the phpUnderControl development is hosted on github. This means that from now on the latest version of phpUnderControl can be obtained with the following command:

mapi@arwen ~ $ git clone \
               git://github.com/manuelpichler/phpUnderControl.git

Additionally we have moved the phpUnderControl's PEAR Channel Server from pear.phpunit.de to its own server pear.phpundercontrol.org. At this point I would like to thank Sebastian for providing phpUnderControl's infrastructure under the PHPUnit umbrella for the last three years.

mapi@arwen ~ $ pear uninstall phpunit/phpUnderControl
mapi@arwen ~ $ pear channel-discover pear.phpundercontrol.org
mapi@arwen ~ $ pear install --alldeps phpuc/phpUnderControl-beta
Starting to download phpUnderControl-0.5.1.tgz (539,717 bytes)
..........................................done: 539,717 bytes
install ok: channel://pear.phpundercontrol.org/phpUnderControl-0.5.1

Just now I found in Felix's blog this excellent phpUnderControl tutorial that comes with useful tips and helping scripts. Because I think it is a really good source to get started with phpUnderControl I will link it here.

• Bug fix: CC is compatible with Java 1.5, but the phpUnderControl 0.4.6 sources were compiled against Java 1.6.

Visit phpUnderControl's download page for release packages.

There was a documentation error in the previously presented ant build file for the new merge-phpunit command of phpUnderControl. The @failonerror-attribute of the <exec />-tag in the merge target was set to false, which results in not failed CruiseControl builds To fix this behaviour, you must modify the merge target in your build.xml, so that it looks similar to the following example.

Beside this documentation error, there was a bug in version 0.4.3 related to the same topic, which is fixed now. So please make sure you have the latest version (at least 0.4.4) installed.

I recently released a bugfix version of phpUnderControl. Beside some minor view errors like the odd/even rows problem, the 0.4.4 release of phpUnderControl fixes a bug in the new merged phpunit logs feature, which doesn't cause CruiseControl to fail for such builds.

I currently released a new version of phpUnderControl. Beside some minor fixes this release comes with a new feature to aggregate test results of multiple PHPUnit runs.

Use the new cli command merge-phpunit of phpUnderControl to merge multiple log files produced with PHPUnit, as shown in the following example build file for ant.

phpUnderControl merged phpunit log view

Yesterday kore asked me about a strange behavior of phpUnderControl. The last arbit build done by phpUnderControl has failed, but when we looked over the different result pages everything looks fine.

phpUnderControl overview page of arbit

Strange! What has happened?

After an analysis session of the 6MB XML log file I detected the following self explaining entry. The PHPUnit tests for arbit had completely failed.

Ok, the test run failed, but why did phpUnderControl say: All Tests passed?

The answer is really simple. Due to the fact that phpunit died, it didn't generate any log file and previous log files still reside in build/logs. Because CruiseControl cannot know anything about these outdated build artifacts, it still publishes them as result for last build.

At this moment I realized that I have never mentioned a clean-target for the ant build.xml file, neither in the example file nor in a blog post or the FAQ. So now its time to catch up on this topic.

You should add an additional target to your ant build.xml file, that removes all log files and build artifacts of previous builds, before the main build cycle starts.

That's it. Now you will get the expected(not really) result: No Tests Run - This project doesn't have any tests.

Here is a small code snippet that can be used to integrate php's internal lint syntax check into your build process. The ant task apply behaves like the exec task, but it accepts a nested fileset element. This allows to process a set of input files thru a single command.

This can also be used as an addition in your phpunit target or any other command which executes code during the build-process, when the command would quit due to a syntax error.

Due to the fact that every software is individual and in this context the used tools differ from build-process to build-process phpUnderControl 0.3.6 introduced a new feature that allows to customize the main menu bar. It is a simple placeholder based preprocessor. It extracts custom tabs from an existing phpUnderControl installation and takes them into newer version during the update process.

At the moment only the main.jsp file supports this new preprocessor between each of the predefined tabs. Each phpUnderControl placeholder has the following format <%-- phpUnderControl ([0-9]+) --%> where ([0-9]+) represents a unique number. The following example shows a section from the main.jsp file as it is shipped with phpUnderControl 0.3.6.

Now I would like to add two more documentation types to my build result. The agile Testdox documentation, generated by PHPUnit and the end user documentation generated from docbook xml files in the source repository.

I simply translated the placeholder number 5 into an opening %<-- begin phpUnderControl 5 --%> and a closing <%-- end phpUnderControl 5 --%> placeholder and put my custom tabs between this two comment. And this is what it looks like now.

Customized phpUnderControl tab-panel

And the best thing is that you do not need to worry about future updates.

Except minor enhancements and bugfixes the latest phpUnderControl version comes with two new features.

Customizable tab-panel

This version allows you to define additional tabs in the main tab-panel. These can be used for further artifacts. Future phpUnderControl updates care about custom tabs and keep them in the new version.

Test execution time

This version has a new chart, which visualizes the trend of the unit test execution time.

Test execution time metric

Yesterday I have released the latest phpUnderControl 0.3.5 version. In addition to many minor improvements this version brings two new features. A new index page, inspired by the dashboard of the continuous integration tool hudson

phpUnderControl dashboard

and a custom PhpDocumentor template which has its roots in the eZ Components api documentation.

new phpdoc template.

Except these changes phpUnderControl comes with a lot of minor visual changes, mostly done by kore. Anymore I would like to thank tobias for his work on saturday evening, to get the phpunit.de pear channel to work

Yesterday I released version 0.3.(0|1|2) of phpUnderControl. Except bugfixes and enhancements the major change in this new version of phpUnderControl is an ezcGraph replacement of the original cewolf metrics view. For the excellent appearance of the generated graphics I would like to thank kore, who supported me actively with his deep knowledge of the ezcGraph component. Beside the better appearance, the new graph implementation has another advantage, it performs much better than the original cewolf implementation, because cewolf generates graphics in real time, while the new ezcGraph solution generates static graphics during the build process.

phpUnderControl 0.3.2 Metrics

To integrate the graph generator into your build process, you must alter the <publishers /> elements in the config.xml file. Simply add a CruiseControl execute-publisher that calls the phpUnderControl cli tool with the graph command, as shown in the following example.

The phpUnderControl graph command expects at least the project log directory as argument, it is the directory where CruiseControl stores the merged xml log files. In this default mode phpUnderControl will generate the metric charts for each build into logs/<project-name>/<build-timestamp>/graph directories. If you use a different CruiseControl setup where artifacts are not stored in the logs/ directory you can call the graph command with a second argument that specifies the output directory, for example:

[mapi@arwen /opt/cruisecontrol]$ phpuc graph logs/phpUnderControl \
                                             artifacts/phpUnderControl

Finally I say thanks to Sebastian, because he integrates a new css file for the coverage reports into PHPUnit, that produces a harmonious overall picture between phpUnderControl and the coverage-report. This stylesheet is yet another contribution by kore.

PHPUnit Coverage report

All phpUnderControl versions are available thru the phpunit.de pear channel, just type:

[mapi@arwen ~]$ pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
[mapi@arwen ~]$ pear install --alldeps phpunit/phpUnderControl-beta

I am using CruiseControl for some time now, to run all Unit Tests for a project continuous after each commit. Since Sebastian Bergmann started the development of PHPUnit 3.2 he added support for software metrics and PMD to PHPUnit, that give you further informations about the quality of your source code. These two features are really well integrated into CruiseControl, the only thing you need to do is to comment out the following lines in the main.jsp file.

The next thing that is important for each project is the coding standard of a project, a company or at least a single person. Java has a nice tool called Checkstyle that checks all your code against a defined set of rules. I knew this tool really well from my diploma thesis, because I used Checkstyle to check the complete code against the Sun coding standards. Checkstyle is also really good integrated into CruiseControl, so that it checks on each build that your code meets the coding standards.

So what can a PHP developer do, to achieve the same support? This question is answered fast! There is a nice PEAR package that does nearly the same job as Checkstyle. The name of this package is PHP_CodeSniffer. This PEAR package provides a variety of pre defined coding standards like PEAR, ZEND etc., a small cli script phpcs to run PHP_CodeSniffer against your code and as best it provides an XML output generator. This output is not compatible with checkstyle but it is simple to transform into the Checkstyle format that is supported by CruiseControl. You can use the following stylesheet to transform the PHP_CodeSniffer output for your CruiseControl installation:

You have to add the following lines to your ant build.xml file:

PLEASE NOTE I know that ant supports xsl transformation without external exec commands but it doesn't work with my current gcj installation.