Continuous integration (CI) tools are essential to help you keep up with the development and deployment of your PHP Laravel application. If you’re looking to set up your own CI tool or want to find one that’s compatible with your current workflow, read on for a list of continuous integration tools that can easily be implemented into any Laravel project.
One of the biggest challenges in software development is building and testing software quickly. Traditional development methodologies, such as building software using a single computer, require a lot of planning and coordination. This also presents a new set of challenges for teams as they are unable to build and test software as quickly as they would like. Today, we have a number of different tools that can help us overcome these traditional challenges.
These tools are also great if you want to automate your testing process further, handle deployments, and check out code before merging it into your repository.
What is Continuous Integration?
continuous integration (CI) is an automated and continuous testing and deployment strategy in which the build and test processes are repeated throughout the lifecycle of the software product. The build and test processes are usually automated, most commonly by CI servers, but also by homegrown scripts, continuous-integration tools such as Hudson, Bamboo, TeamCity, or Codeship, and even in some cases by GitHub pull requests.
Why is Continuous Integration Important?
Continuous Integration is a method of software development that combines automated testing with a build system. It is a software development best practice that involves processes for developing, testing, and deploying software. It typically involves the usage of version control, automated testing, build tools, data quality tools, and other software development best practices. In a limited sense, it is a process for building software iteratively and frequently.
Top Continuous Integration Tools for PHP Laravel Development
Stash
A powerful tool enables you to integrate, organize and manage all of your software development projects. You can check them in or out as needed, use advanced search to find a particular revision, or browse source files and logs.
The platform is free while offering powerful features such as submodules that come with private repositories, free for up to three users. The free tier doesn’t have any deployment capabilities, but it’s easy enough to move between machines and share commits.
PHP Code Sniffer
PHP Code Sniffer (PHPCS) is a package for syntax checking, available from PEAR. It can check code against defined rules covering anything from whitespace through doc comments to variable naming conventions and beyond.
PHP_CodeSniffer is a set of two PHP scripts; the main phpcs script that tokenizes PHP, JavaScript and CSS files to detect violations of a defined coding standard, and a second phpcbf script to automatically correct coding standard violations. PHP_CodeSniffer is an essential development tool that ensures your code remains clean and consistent.
CircleCI
CircleCI helps developers focus on what they seamlessly do best: writing code. The platform provides users with a simple interface to get started and build their projects without getting bogged down in configuration or setup.
As an added bonus, CircleCI works seamlessly with Git and GitHub—two tools that are critical to a developer’s workflow. With just one click, CircleCI pulls from GitHub and begins testing every time you push new code to your repository.
Codeship
Codeship is a continuous integration and deployment platform designed to automate testing, building, and deploying applications. There are Codeship plans available that cater to any project – open source or private – and at any stage. Codeship supports a wide range of programming languages and frameworks, including PHP.
TeamCity
TeamCity is a continuous integration platform that delivers continuous software delivery, release tracking, and issue management to customers, agile teams, and code repositories. Continuous integration and delivery is an essential practice for any software development team. However, it is possible to implement this practice without a continuous integration system. In this article, we will explore how to build a continuous integration system, how to install it, and how to use it to implement a CI/CD pipeline.
Travis CI
Travis CI is a service that allows you to run your automated tests after every commit, ensuring your code will always pass any scrutiny. Once you integrate Travis with your GitHub repository, it’ll automatically run any tests present there.
If something fails, it’ll send an email to notify you right away. Moreover, all build results are archived in its repository for evaluation later.
Semaphore
Semaphore is a fully integrated, hosted continuous integration service built for service-based teams. It provides a browser-based interface to our platform where you can build and test, with confidence, applications such as web sites, mobile apps, and websites for other web browsers while taking advantage of our robust build-processing and deployment infrastructure.
Bamboo
Bamboo is a continuous integration service built for software teams. Our focus is on providing the best experience for building, testing, and deploying code to production. Our unique blend of features, including source control and testing as a service, helps teams build better software faster. Currently, over half a million developers and teams around the world use our services to build better digital products and grow their businesses.
Gitlab CI/CD
Gitlab is an open-source, self-hosted application that allows you to host your code repositories and collaborate with fellow developers. That collaboration extends to Gitlab’s robust continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) capabilities. This enables you to automatically test your code before pushing it live and make sure every commit is stable. It also makes deploying live updates a breeze.
Jenkins
Jenkins is a continuous integration server that enables you to automate every step in your software delivery process. You can use Jenkins to automate builds, run test suites, and even deploy code—all from one place.
Jenkins is an open source automation server. It helps automate the parts of software development related to building, testing, and deploying, facilitating continuous integration and continuous delivery. It is a server-based system that runs in servlet containers such as Apache Tomcat.
PHP Mess Detector
A PHP Mess Detector is a software package that monitors the health of the site. It produces emails alerting you to potentially dangerous content as well as taking action on your behalf to fix the issue, such as temporarily shutting down a dangerous script, redirecting to a page about the problem, or even completely disabling the script.
Code analysis tests
Automated code analysis is a great way to ensure that your application runs correctly in production. Using code analysis tests, you can identify and fix any bugs you may have introduced in your most recent commits to your repo.
These tests should be an essential part of any CI process as they help detect and resolve problems early on. Integrating these tests into an existing continuous integration setup with a simple command-line call is easy.
Conclusion
Continuous integration is a practice of continuously building software and evaluating it. Over the years, this approach has become immensely popular, and many CI tools are available today. The CI tools we’ve discussed are different, so you can choose what works best for your Laravel development services.
Continuous integration tools are extremely powerful instruments for delivering software systems on a regular basis. They are essential for any agile team, which is why we strongly support the use of these tools at every stage of application development from the very beginning.
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