Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment with PHP

CircleCI works seamlessly with all the tools and package managers that help PHP developers test and deploy their code. We can generally infer most of your dependencies and test commands, but we also provide custom configuration via a circle.yml file checked into your repo’s root directory. The examples here referring to PHP filepaths are for the Ubuntu 14.04 and newer images. This image is not default but can be chosen in Project Settings -> Build Environment. For Ubuntu 12.04, replace /opt/circleci/php with ~/.phpenv/versions in the examples.

Version

We have many versions of PHP pre-installed on Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 14.04 build images.

If you don’t want to use the default, you can specify your version in circle.yml:

machine:
  php:
    version: 7.0.4

Dependencies

CircleCI has the composer, pear, and pecl package managers installed. If we find a composer.json file, then we’ll automatically run composer install.

To install your dependencies with either pear or pecl, you have to include dependency commands in your circle.yml file. The following example shows how to install the MongoDB extension using pecl.

dependencies:
  pre:
    - pecl install mongo

You can also edit your PHP configuration from your circle.yml. For example, if you have a custom configuration file checked in to your repo, then you could do:

dependencies:
  pre:
    - cp config/custom.ini /opt/circleci/php/$(phpenv global)/etc/conf.d/

Note: phpenv global returns the PHP version that has been specified in your circle.yml file.

Here’s another example showing how you could adjust PHP settings in a .ini file.

dependencies:
  pre:
    - echo "memory_limit = 64M" > /opt/circleci/php/$(phpenv global)/etc/conf.d/memory.ini

Note: you’ll have to specify your PHP version in your circle.yml in order to edit PHP’s configuration files.

Databases

We have pre-installed more than a dozen databases and queues, including PostgreSQL and MySQL. If needed, you have the option of manually setting up your test database.

Using the Apache Webserver

Apache2 is already installed on CircleCI containers but it needs to be configured to host your PHP application.

To enable your site check a file containing your site configuration into your repository and copy it to /etc/apache2/sites-available/ during your build. Then enable the site with a2ensite and restart Apache.

An example configuration that uses PHP5 and sets up Apache to serve the PHP site from /home/ubuntu/MY-PROJECT/server-root is:

Listen 8080

<VirtualHost *:8080>
  LoadModule php5_module /opt/circleci/php/PHP_VERSION/usr/lib/apache2/modules/libphp5.so 

  DocumentRoot /home/ubuntu/MY-PROJECT/server-root
  ServerName host.example.com
  <FilesMatch \.php$>
    SetHandler application/x-httpd-php
  </FilesMatch>
  
  # Other directives here
</VirtualHost>

Replace MY-SITE in with the name of your site configuration file and PHP_VERSION with the version of PHP you configured in your circle.yml.

Note: This is not supported for PHP7.

Then enable your site and restart Apache by adding the following to your circle.yml

dependencies:
  post:
    - sudo cp ~/MY-PROJECT/MY-SITE /etc/apache2/sites-available
    - sudo a2ensite MY-SITE
    - sudo service apache2 restart

Testing

CircleCI always runs your tests on a fresh machine. If we find a phpunit.xml file in your repo, then we’ll run phpunit for you. You can add custom test commands to the test section of your circle.yml:

test:
  override:
    - ./my_testing_script.sh

If you want CircleCI to show a test summary of your build see Metadata collection in custom test steps for PHPUnit.

Disable Xdebug

Xdebug is installed for all versions of PHP, and is enabled by default on our 14.04 build image.

During the dependencies stage of PHP builds our inference runs composer install if required. In the build output you may see:

You are running composer with xdebug enabled. This has a major impact on runtime performance.

Since this is a CI environment and many of your dependencies will be cached, the performance hit is not major and you can safely ignore the warning.

If you would like to completely disable Xdebug on 14.04 you can add the following to your circle.yml file:

dependencies:
  pre:
    - rm /opt/circleci/php/$(phpenv global)/etc/conf.d/xdebug.ini

Deployment

CircleCI offers first-class support for deployment. When a build is green, CircleCI will deploy your project as directed in your circle.yml file. We can deploy to PaaS providers as well as to physical servers under your control.

Troubleshooting for PHP

If you run into problems, check out our PHP troubleshooting write-ups about these issues:

• Adding memcached with pecl on CircleCI
• Composer hitting GitHub API rate limits