Xinc. Continuous Integration

Continuous integration is a software engineering practice, which helps to integrate changes frequently in a project. It speeds up the delivery of software by decreasing integration times. It’s very important when the project is being developed by more than one person. CruiseControl is a free CI server and probably the most used. Xinc (Xinc Is Not Cruisecontrol) is an alternative free CI server made specially for PHP. The Xinc development is led by Arno Schneider, a german developer currently living in Barcelona. Arno made a wonderful presentation at the Barcelona PHP Conference celebrated last month:

We can install Xinc easily with PEAR.

sudo pear channel-discover pear.xinc.eu
sudo pear install --alldeps xinc/Xinc
sudo pear run-scripts xinc/Xinc

When we run the scripts, we can configure some parameters like:

 1. Directory to keep the Xinc config files: /etc/xinc
 2. Directory to keep the Xinc Projects and Status information: /var/xinc
 3. Directory to keep the Xinc log files: /var/log
 4. Directory to install the Xinc start/stop daemon: /etc/init.d
 5. Do you want to install the SimpleProject example: yes
 6. Directory to install the Xinc web-application: /var/www/xinc
 7. IP of Xinc web-application: 127.0.0.1
 8. Port of Xinc web-application: 8080

Once the installation is complete, we need to include /etc/xinc/www.conf in our apache virtual hosts. We also have to have mod-rewrite enabled.