Manuel Pichler

Today I have released the second beta version of phpUnderControl. Beside several minor tweaks and bug fixes, this release contains one additional feature I was asked for during the IPC in Berlin. This feature allows you to specify a maximum number of log entries that will be shown in the generated metric charts. This can be very useful once you have a project with a great amount of builds and the chart rendering gets slower and slower.

This feature adds a new option --max-number to phpUnderControl's chart command. To rebuild all your charts you can call phpUnderControl's shell script with the following command:

  mapi@arwen ~ $ phpuc --force-update --max-number 42 \
                 /opt/cruisecontrol/logs/phpUnderControl \
                 /opt/cruisecontrol/logs/phpUnderControl

You can get the latest release of phpUnderControl through its pear channel:

  mapi@arwen ~ $ pear upgrade --alldeps phpuc/phpUnderControl-0.6.0beta2
  Starting to download phpUnderControl-0.6.0beta2.tgz (546,314 bytes)
  ...................................................................
  .............................done: 546,314 bytes

or you can get the latest development version on github.

As many of you may already have noticed, there will be a big change in my career as a professional software engineer and architect this summer. Together with Kore and Toby I am in the process of founding a company. The focus of this company will be on services all around the whole quality life cycle in PHP projects.

Under the hood of our company we will also offer support, trainings and consulting for several quality assurance tools, like pdepend, phpmd and phpUnderControl. For you, this opens a great opportunity. You can use the tools and the documentation, as well as participate in the community, as usual. But from now on you can also purchase professional support, if you get stuck or need general assitance. And when you miss a feature or need an individual extension for one of these tools, don't hesitate to contact us.

I am really excited what cool things will happen in the next couple of years and I am looking forward to cowork with professionals like Toby and Kore.

To finalize the little marketing for the company and its services I would appreciate to meet you, your colleagues and your compmany, to give presentations or into-depth trainings on one of the tools or on quality assurance in general.

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

After quite some time of silence around phpUnderControl I have bundled the 0.5.0 release today. Beside minor changes, bugfixes and enhancements this release contains one new major feature, the PHP_CodeBrowser.

phpUnderControl integrating PHP_CodeBrowser

The PHP_CodeBrowser is a separate application that collects various XML log files with different project metrics/violations and presents them in a browseable source view with syntax highligting. This tool is a contribution by the Mayflower GmbH, where it was developed and now shared with the Open Source Community. At this point I would like to thank Mayflower as a whole and in particular at Elger and Thorsten, which were responsible for all technical aspects of this contribution.

To use the PHP_CodeBrowser you must add an additional execute publisher to your CruiseControl config.xml file that generates the PHP_CodeBrowser html report and an additional artifacts publisher to move the generated PHP_CodeBrowser report into the projects artifacts directory.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<cruisecontrol>
  <!-- ... -->
  <project name="PHP_Depend" buildafterfailed="false">
    <!-- ... -->
    <publishers>
      <!-- ... -->
      <execute command="phpcb 
        --log projects/${project.name}/build/logs 
        --source projects/${project.name}/source/PHP 
        --output projects/${project.name}/build/php-code-browser"/>
      <artifactspublisher 
        dir="projects/${project.name}/build/php-code-browser" 
        dest="artifacts/${project.name}" 
        subdirectory="php-code-browser"/>
      <!-- ... -->
    </publishers>
  </project>
</cruisecontrol>

But why do we use a CruiseControl publishers instead of a regular ant (Your build tool here) target? The answer is really simple. The PHP_CodeBrowser must be the very last artifact generated for a project, which means it must also run after PHPUnit, to collect the test result logs. But in most setups PHPUnit is configured with failonerror="on" to mark a build as failed, when an error occured during the test execution. But with this configuration a following PHP_CodeBrowser target would never be executed by ant, because the build failed already. This cannot happen with a CruiseControl publisher which is always executed in a separated process.

If you create a new project with phpUnderControl's project command, phpUnderControl will automatically search for an installed PHP_CodeBrowser and add the required publishers to your config.xml file when it is present.

mapi@arwen ~ $ phpuc project \
       --project-name PHP_Depend \
       --source-dir PHP \
       --test-case PHP_Depend_AllTests \
       --test-dir tests \
       --test-file PHP/Depend/AllTests.php \
       --version-control svn \
       --version-control-url http://svn.pdepend.org/branches/0.9.0 \
       /opt/cruisecontrol/cruisecontrol-bin-2.8.2

To get the latest version of phpUnderControl, you can use the PEAR-Channel-Server:

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

or you can check it out from the subversion repository:

mapi@arwen ~ $ svn co svn://phpunit.de/phpunit/phpUnderControl/trunk

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.

• Fixed #621: phpUnderControl dashboard is broken with CruiseControl 2.8 - [4085]
• Closed #609: Use artifacts directory for artifacts - [4118]
• Closed #611: opera: code coverage not visible - [4119]
• Closed #622: phpUnderControl needs a custom error page - [4116]

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

Even if there is not much noise around phpUnderControl and PHP_Depend at the moment, the development of both projects still goes on. Due to the fact that there are some personal movements in these days I have modified my priorities and everything evolves slower, but I plan to spend more time on these projects, at least from the last quarter of this year.

To put your minds on rest, the next release of phpUnderControl is nearly finished, so stay tuned.

Greetings Manuel

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.

A few minutes ago I have released the latest phpUnderControl 0.4.0 version. In addition to many minor fixes and improvements this version comes with three utility commands, that should simplify some common tasks.

1) Project delete

The project delete command provides a simple way to delete a complete project with all its contents, including logs, artifacts and sources, from your CruiseControl installation.

[mapi@arwen~]$ phpuc delete --project-name connectfour /opt/cruisecontrol

2) Project clean

I do not really like this feature, because I really dislike the idea to delete old builds and artifacts, but I must admit that I have mounted a 100 GB partition as artifacts directory. Due to the fact that this feature was requested by many phpUnderControl users, it is implemented in phpUnderControl 0.4.0.

This command allows you to delete old logs and artifacts except a configurable number of the latests builds. The following command will remove all build results for the php-under-control except the last 20 builds.

[mapi@arwen~]$ phpuc clean --project-name php-under-control \
                           --keep-builds 20 /opt/cruisecontrol

3) Project create

The project create command provides a cli wizard to set up a new CruiseControl project. The following command will create a new project for the PHPUnit BankAccount sample, checkout the latest svn version, create the required directories and finally prepare the ant build.xml and the CruiseControl config.xml. If you don't like XML or you have multiple projects, that share a common source/project layout, this command could be useful for you.

[mapi@arwen~]$ phpuc project --version-control svn \
                             --version-control-url svn://svn.phpunit.de/.. \
                             --project-name BankAccount2 \
                             --source-dir . \
                             --test-case BankAccountTest \
                             --test-dir . \
                             --test-file BankAccountTest.php \
                             --schedule-interval 20 \
                             /opt/cruisecontrol

But I would always recommend to use the example build.xml and config.xml to set up a new project. Both files are completely documented and contain links to the original CruiseControl configuration reference.

I will do my best to complete the missing documentation for the CruiseControl config.xml file and the new cli commands. Any help is welcome.

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.