Can you do “builds” with PHP scripts or an interpreted language?

Question

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a "build" is a "compile", and not every language compiles. Continuous Integration involves building components to see if they continue to work beyond unit tests, which I might be oversimplifying. But if your project involves a language that does not compile, how do you perform nightly builds or use continuous integration techniques?

Answer 1

Hmm... I'd define "building" as something like "preparing, packaging and deploying all artifacts of a software system". The compilation to machine code is only one of many steps in the build. Others might be checking out the latest version of the code from scm-system, getting external dependencies, setting configuration values depending on the target the software gets deployed to and running some kind of test suite to ensure you've got a "working/running build" before you actually deploy.

"Building" software can/must be done for any software, independent of your programming langugage. Intepreted languages have the "disadvantage" that syntactic or structural (meaning e.g. calling a method with wrong parameters etc.) errors normally will only be detected at runtime (if you don't have a separate step in your build which checks for such errors e.g. with PHPLint).

Thus (automated) Testcases (like Unit-Tests - see PHPUnit or SimpleTest - and Frontend-Tests - see Selenium) are all the more important for big PHP projects to ensure the good health of the code.

There's a great Build-Tool (like Ant for Java or Rake for Ruby) for PHP too: Phing

CI-Systems like Xinc or Hudson are simply used to automagically (like anytime a change is checked into scm) package your code, check it for obvious errors, run your tests (in short: run your build) and report the results back to your development team.

Answer 2

Create a daily tag of your current source control trunk?