Phing is a PHP project build tool with similar capabilities as GNU make. It can be configured via XML (see build.xml and build-dev.xml) to install your application, run automatic tests and code standards checks, build CSS files from LESS and more.
You can list all available Phing targets by running:
php phing -l
Every Phing target is a task that can be executed simply by php phing <target-name> command.
Tip: You can use shorthand command ./phing <target-name> on Unix system or phing <target-name> in Windows CMD instead of php phing <target-name>.
Builds the application for development with clean demo DB and runs checks on changed files.
Most important build command for development. Wipes the application data, installs missing dependencies via Composer, creates clean DB and fills it with demo data, prepares assets, builds LESS into CSS, prepares error pages, checks coding standards in changed files (with changes against origin/master) and runs the unit, database, and smoke tests.
Builds the application for development preserving your DB while skipping non-essential steps.
Useful for quick migration of recently pulled changes. Cleans cache, installs missing dependencies via Composer, executes DB migrations, prepares assets and builds LESS into CSS.
Runs PHP built-in web server for a chosen domain.
This means you can see the application running without configuring Nginx or Apache server locally.
Cleans up directories with cache and scripts which are generated on demand.
Your go-to command when you feel something should work but does not. Especially useful in the test environment in which cache is not automatically invalidated.
Generates a new database migration class when DB schema is not satisfying ORM.
When you make changes to ORM entities you should run this command that will generate a new migration file for you.
Executes database migrations and checks schema.
Creates database with required db extensions and collations (that are operating system specific, unfortunately).
The target interactively asks for DB superuser credentials in order to perform all the actions so it is not needed to put superuser credentials into app/config/parameters.yml.
When a locale is not supported by the operating system the command explains the situation and links to the documentation.
The command is designed to be run only during the first creation of the database but as it uses IF NOT EXISTS commands, it can be manually run on existing database in order to create new DB extensions or collations, too.
Drops all data in the database and creates a new one with demo data.
Drops all data in the test database and creates a new one with demo data.
Note: All database related targets db-* have their test-db-* variant for the test database.
Installs demo images.
Checks coding standards in source files. Checking all files may take a few minutes, standards-diff is much quicker as it checks only files changed against origin/master.
Automatically fixes some coding standards violations in all or only changed files.
Runs unit, database and smoke tests on a newly built test database.
Creates a new test database with demo data and runs all tests except acceptance and performance (they are more time-consuming).
Runs acceptance tests. Running Selenium server is required.
More on this topic can be found in Running Acceptance Tests.
Runs the Selenium server for acceptance testing. ChromeDriver is required.
Runs performance tests on a newly built test database with performance data.
It may take a few hours as the generation of performance data is very time-consuming. Should be executed on CI server only.
The size of performance data to be generated and asserted limits can be configured via parameters defined in parameters_common.yml.
You can easily override the default values in your parameters.yml or parameters_test.yml configuration files.
Runs background jobs. Should be executed periodically by system Cron every 5 minutes.
Essential for the production environment. Periodically executed Cron modules recalculate visibility, generate XML feeds and sitemaps, provide error reporting etc.
Lists all available background jobs.
Builds CSS into LESS via Grunt.
Useful when modifying only LESS files.
Extracts translatable messages from the whole project including back-end.
Great tool when you want to translate your application into another language.
You can customize any property defined in build.xml via configuration file build/build.local.properties (use build/build.local.properties.dist as a template).
For example, you may define the path to your installed ChromeDriver (required for running acceptance tests) on Windows by:
path.chromedriver.executable=C:/Tools/chromedriver.exe