Till's blog

I'm a huge advocate of CI and one service in particular called Travis-Ci.

Travis-CI runs a continuous integration platform for both open source and commercial products. In a nutshell: Travis-CI listens for a commit to a Github repository and runs your test suite. Simple as that, no Jenkins required.

At Imagine Easy we happily take advantage of both. :)

So what's wrong?

For some reason, every other open source project (and probably a lot of closed source projects), use Travis-CI wrong in a way, that it will eventually break your builds.

When exactly? Whenever Travis-CI promotes composer to be a first-class citizen on the platform and attempts to run composer install automatically for you.

There may be breakage, but there may also be slowdown because by then you may end up with not one, but two composer install runs before your tests actually run.

Here's what needs fixing

A lot of projects use composer like so:

language: php
before_script: composer install --dev
script: phpunit

Here's what you have to adjust

language: php
install: composer install --dev
script: phpunit

install vs. before_script

I had never seen the install target either. Not consciously at least. And since I don't do a lot of CI for Ruby projects, I wasn't exposed to it either. On a Ruby build, Travis-CI will automatically run bundler for you, using said install target.

order of execution

In a nutshell, here are the relevant targets and how the execute:

1. before_install
2. install
3. before_script
4. script

The future

The future is that Travis-CI will do the following:

1. before_install will self-update the composer(.phar)
2. install will run composer install
3. There is also the rumour of a composer_opts (or similar) setting so you can provide something like --prefer-source to the install target, without having to add an install target

Fin

Is any of this your fault? I don't think so, since the documentation leaves a lot to be desired. Scanning it while writing this blog post, I can't find a mention of install target on the pages related to building PHP products.

Long story short: go update your configurations now! ;)

I've started with doctrine/cache and doctrine/dbal, and will make it a habit to send a PR each time I see a configuration which is not what it should be.