For the past weeks I’ve wrote a series of articles on how to create a continuous integration server which began with the article Tools for a Continuous Integration (CI) server for PHP projects.
You can automate much more than what I’ve shown in this series of articles, specially front-end processes or automated tests and I hope you got to a point where you can investigate and start to tweak the continuous integration process to match your needs.
Following the previous article where you’ve installed TeamCity, you can now say that you have a Continuous Integration Server. But it doesn’t do much without an Agent or a Build Configuration.
What is this? A Build Configuration is a list of steps that will be executed. Think about merging all less files and compact all the files into a single minified .css file. Another step from the same configuration could be uglify Javascript files (or, following the same logic of the first step, parse CoffeeScript into Javascript).
TeamCity is a Continuous Integration aplication, developed by JetBrains that supports multiple programming languages (such as Java, .Net and PHP). Although it’s a commercial tool, there’s a freemium version that allows you to use it freely with up to 20 configuration builds and 3 build agents. If you have an open source project, you can apply to a free licence. Check the licencing page to know more about this.
