PHP Continuous Delivery with Jenkins CI

Jenkins is the leading open-source Continuous Integration server but is it suitable for a Continuous Delivery workflow too? In this article we are going to use Jenkins to implement a simple Continuous Delivery workflow for a PHP application using Phing and Rocketeer.

Prerequisites

This article depends on a previous article Deploying a PHP Application with Rocketeer. Before you walk through this article you must have read the depending article.

Phing

Install Phing globally.

Install Jenkins plugins

• Phing is an alternative to Apache Ant and allows you to use Phing to build PHP projects

You can install the above plugins by using the web frontend or Jenkins CLI client.

Setup a PHP project with a deploying/delivery workflow using Rocketeer

Follow the steps described in Deploying a PHP Application with Rocketeer to setup a sample PHP project.

Setup Jenkins Job

1. Click on “New Item”, choose “Freestyle project” and enter an item name.
2. Fill in your “Source Code Management” information.
3. Configure a “Build Trigger”, for instance “Poll SCM”.
4. Add a build step and choose “Invoke Phing targets”
   • select a Phing Version
   • fill in the Target “deploy”
   • in the Properties field add
     host=your_host
     username=your_username
     password=your_password
5. Click “Save”.

To test the Jenkins Job click on the job name, and click on “Build Now”.

Real-world scenario

In a real-world scenario you probably would configure another “Build Trigger”. If your project should be build after other projects are built you can check the option “Build after other projects are built” and fill in a “Project to watch”.

With such a configuration it is possible to chain certain Jenkins Jobs:

• Execute Job “Continuous Integration”
• If it finishes successfully execute Job “Continuous Delivery”
• If it finishes successfully execute Job “XYZ”
• etc.