If you ever wondered How to set up Continuous Integration with Laravel, well, everything starts with a test! Continuous integration (CI) is part of the DevOps approach and it goes together with TDD (Test Driven Development). We need to use a test suit like PHP Unit. Write actual tests before we can start using this approach. Otherwise CI it won’t make sense.

There are various platforms that we can use to do CI. One of them, the one that I will be using here is Circleci. But we can use BitBucket, GitLab, Jenkins, Travis, and more.

Continuous Integration| Requirements

We need to take a different approach when we build our applications in order to take advantage of CI. That is known as TDD.

Test-driven development (TDD) is a development technique where you must first write a test that fails before you write new functional code. TDD is being quickly adopted by agile software developers for development of application source code and is even being adopted by Agile DBAs for database development

Agiledata.org

Continuous Integration | Laravel Test-Driven Development

In Laravel, we can use the phpunit test suite to start writing our tests. This is the first step to learn how to set up Continuous Integration using Laravel and

For example, something like that could go in the tests/features/BookmarksTest.php file:

  /** @test */
    public function guests_cannot_save_bookmarks()
    {

        //$this->withoutExceptionHandling();
        $user = factory('App\User')->create();
        $this->actingAs($user);
        $attributes = factory('App\Bookmark')->raw();

        $this->post('/bookmarks', $attributes);
        $this->assertDatabaseMissing('bookmarks', $attributes);
    } 

Laravel comes with a built-in set of commands that we can use to speed up development. One of these commands is used to generate tests files.

php artisan make:test BookmarksTest

To see a description of this command we can use the help option

php artisan help make:test

We can run our tests by typing:

vendor/bin/phpunit 

If in the terminal, we run the command below, we will store an alias inside our bash_profile file on Linux. This will help us to avoid to type that over and over, and it looks like that:

echo ‘alias test=”vendor/bin/phpunit” >> ./profile_rc’

After that, we can type test in the terminal and our tests will run.

There is a lot more to learn about TDD. But for the purpose of this article that’s enough to get to the point. You can learn more about TDD on Laracasts.

Continuous Integration | Version Control

Once our tests are written and our repository is online we can move forward. See this video if you don’t know how to use git to version control your source code

Continuous Integration | Setting up Circleci

Now we are ready to register a free account on Circleci. You can signup using GitHub or BitBucket, I am using bitbucket because it’s where I host all my repositories. We can then import our project from Bitbucket so that Circleci can do its job. Track commits and triggers a new build, every time running tests to check our code.

We need to create a config file before our build process with Circle ci returns a green light. That means a successfully built and tested application. We need to place a config.yml file inside our project and make some adjustments to make it work. Check the CircleCI PHP documentation for more details.

I made a few adjustments to make the config file work with My Laravel application. My phpunit.xml is configured to use SQLite database in memory. So, I have commented out these two lines from my config file, you can safely remove them:

 #- run: touch storage/testing.sqlite
      #- run: php artisan migrate --env=testing --database=sqlite_testing --force

I have also upgraded the docker image. So that it uses PHP 7.2 instead of the default 7.1. Some of the dependencies of my application required PHP 7.2.

 - image: circleci/php:7.2-node-browsers 

Laravel uses a .env file to store some configuration details. It is not submitted to the repository in the version control. I have included this command below to make a copy of the .env.example file that is instead stored in the repository

 - run: cp .env.example .env
      

Then we need to generate a new application key. Running our tests using phpunit is the final step, so we add these two more commands

- run: php artisan key:generate
- run: ./vendor/bin/phpunit 

Finally, our configuration file is ready. We need to create a folder inside the root of our project .circleci and create a file named config.yml.

This is the complete config.yml file. You need to place it in ./circleci/config.yml (Remember to push this file to the online repository to trigger the build process).

 version: 2 # use CircleCI 2.0

jobs: # a collection of steps
  build: # runs not using Workflows must have a `build` job as entry point
    docker: # run the steps with Docker
      - image: circleci/php:7.2-node-browsers # ...with this image as the primary container; this is where all `steps` will run
    working_directory: ~/laravel # directory where steps will run
    steps: # a set of executable commands
      - checkout # special step to check out source code to working directory
      - run: sudo apt install -y libsqlite3-dev zlib1g-dev
      - run: sudo docker-php-ext-install zip
      - run: sudo composer self-update
      - restore_cache: # special step to restore the dependency cache if `composer.lock` does not change
          keys:
            - composer-v1-{{ checksum "composer.lock" }}
            # fallback to using the latest cache if no exact match is found (See https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/caching/)
            - composer-v1-
      - run: composer install -n --prefer-dist
      - save_cache: # special step to save the dependency cache with the `composer.lock` cache key template
          key: composer-v1-{{ checksum "composer.lock" }}
          paths:
            - vendor
      - restore_cache: # special step to restore the dependency cache if `package-lock.json` does not change
          keys:
            - node-v1-{{ checksum "package-lock.json" }}
            # fallback to using the latest cache if no exact match is found (See https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/caching/)
            - node-v1-
      - run: yarn install
      - save_cache: # special step to save the dependency cache with the `package-lock.json` cache key template
          key: node-v1-{{ checksum "package-lock.json" }}
          paths:
            - node_modules
      #- run: touch storage/testing.sqlite
      #- run: php artisan migrate --env=testing --database=sqlite_testing --force
      - run: cp .env.example .env
      - run: php artisan key:generate
      - run: ./vendor/bin/phpunit
      # See https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/deployment-integrations/ for deploy examples

 

That was it, you know how to set up Continuous Integration for a Laravel application using Circleci.

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