Getting started with PHP and Bamboo

Information you need before you begin

This introduction assumes you are using Bamboo Server installed on your local network. You need to make sure you or your company administrator have properly installed and configured Bamboo for running plans.

You will also need to install:

• The PHP framework
• PHPUnit testing framework

Step 1: Install the PHP base code framework

In order to get full functionality from Bamboo and PHP, you will need to install the PHP base code framework. If you are using Ubuntu, then use the following command to install PHP.

$ sudo apt-get install php5-cli

See also:

• Installing PHP on MacOS
• Installing PHP on Windows

Step 2: Install PHPUnit

PHPUnit.de provides an excellent PHP archive resource called PHAR.

$ wget https://phar.phpunit.de/phpunit.phar  // download the PHPUnit packages
$ chmod +x phpunit.phar  // make PHPUnit executable
$ mv phpunit.phar /usr/local/bin/phpunit  // copy PHPUnit into your path
$ phpunit --version  // double check it's installed completely

If you prefer, you may use Composer or PEAR to download and install PHPUnit along with its dependencies, however these approaches are beyond the scope of this introduction.

Step 3. Create a project and plan

1. Create a new project

A Bamboo plan defines the details of your continuous integration workflow.  You use a plan to identify the source code repository, specify the tasks to run in your build, and when to trigger a build.  Each plan belongs to a project.  You can add a plan to an existing project or create a new project. In this example, you create both a new project and a new plan in that project.

1. Log into your Bamboo instance as a user with permissions to create plans.
2. Choose Create > Create a New Plan from the menu bar.
   

Every plan belongs to a project. We don't have a project yet, so choose Project > New Project, and enter details for both the project and plan.

2. Configure the plan details

Bamboo needs to know the Plan name, Plan key and a brief description of what the plan is for. See Configuring plans for more details.

3. Choose a source repository

Bamboo needs to know where the source code repository is located, and needs access to the repo so that it can check out the code when it runs a build. See Linking to source code repositories for more details.

4. Triggering the build

We can choose how Bamboo gets triggered to run the plan build:

See Triggering builds for more details.

Step 4. Configure tasks

Each plan needs to have at least one task specified. Tasks do the real work of the plan.

The source code checkout task

A newly created plan has a default Source Code Checkout task that gets the source code from the source repository specified earlier.

See Checking out code for details.

The builder task

We also want to compile the code, and run the unit and integration tests. We'll add a builder task to the Bamboo plan to do that. You will need to have installed PHP and Phing in order to use the PHP build tasks. 

Click Add Task, then Builder and choose the Phing task for your project:

Note that:

• A build tool needs to be installed on the Bamboo server machine before you can use the Bamboo task.
• There are plugins available for Bamboo that add build tasks for other tools, such as Gant and Gradle. See https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/27818?versionId=851052 for details.
• You will also need to specify the path to your build tool for this task.

Unit testing

Unit testing for PHP is completed using the PHPUnit testing framework. This is a port of the popular Java JUnit testing framework to PHP. PHPUnit provides also produces test results in the JUnit XML format required by Bamboo.

You will need to add a server executable capability to run PHPUnit:

1. Go to Overview > Server capabilities.

2. Click Add capability and complete the configuration using the following:

   Capability type	Executable
   Type	PHPUnit
   Executable label	PHPUnit x.x
   Path	Path to the PHPUnit executable e.g. /usr/bin/phpunit-x.x

3. Click Add to add the PHPUnit capability.

Now you can create a PHPUnit testing task:

Getting the test results

Your tests will be run when the builder task compiles the code. Each of the builder tasks above has a section to tell Bamboo to expect test results and where to look for them. You can specify a custom results location if your project directory doesn't use the conventional structure.

See Jobs and tasks for details.

Step 5: Go!

Enable the plan, and click Create.

You should see the plan run. The 'Plan Summary' tab will report whether the build succeeded or not.

Tests in the appropriate directory in the source code repository will be run automatically as part of the build, and the test results will be displayed in Bamboo.

Now, whenever you commit a change to the repository, Bamboo will build your source code and report on your test results.

Get feedback

Bamboo displays a summary of the results of the build on the dashboard.

You can get further information about the build in the following ways:

• Build results for one or more plans can be displayed on a wallboard.
• You can get notifications about build results sent to you by email, IM and RSS feed.
• You can get build statistics about plans, and about developers contributing code to the build.
• You can drill down into the results to see the code changes that triggered the build, and the tests that were run for that build.

See Getting feedback for details.