Vagrant in Zend Framework 1

I recently added support for vagrant to the Zend Framework codebase to enable easier testing. I was motivated by some work the joind.in folks have done to get a working development environment for joind.in development using Vagrant.

Vagrant is a fantastic tool that enables you to manage and run virtual machines from the command line, including automatic provisioning of them using puppet or chef. The really cool thing about it however from my point of view is that vagrant automatically sets up the VM with a folder called /vagrant that holds the code on your local hard drive from where you started the VM. This means that you can continue to edit your code in your local editor/IDE and test it within the VM easily.

I highly recommend checking it out.

ZF1’s Vagrant set up

The Vagrant set up for ZF1 is designed for testing ZF1 against multiple PHP versions. As such it sets up a simple Ubuntu VM with the required toolchain for compiling PHP and provides a script called php-build.sh which will download and build any PHP 5.2, 5.3 or 5.4 version that you are interested in. I based this script on information in Derick Rethans’ excellent Multiple PHP versions set-up article.

One thing that I discovered was that by default, the VM cannot create symlinks in /vagrant. The way to solve this is to add the following to the Vagrantfile:

  config.vm.customize [
    "setextradata", :id, "VBoxInternal2/SharedFoldersEnableSymlinksCreate/v-root", "1"
  ]

I chose to use puppet to install the required packages and created a simple default.pp configuration. I’m sure this isn’t optimal, but it works :)

Running ZF1 unit tests

The process to set up ZF1 to run unit tests in a VM using PHPUnit 3.4, follow these steps:

1. Install requirements for running the VM:

• VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/)
• Ruby (http://www.ruby-lang.org/)
• Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/)

2. Checkout the ZF1 repository:

    $ svn checkout http://framework.zend.com/svn/framework/standard/trunk zf1-dev
    $ cd zf1-dev

3. Start the process by running Vagrant.

    $ vagrant up

This will take a long while as it has to download a VM image and then provision it. Once it has finished, it will exit and leave you back at the command prompt.

4. SSH into the VM

    $ vagrant ssh

Vagrant sets up key-less ssh connections to the VM that “just works” :)

5. Build a version of PHP.

    $ php-build.sh 5.3.11

This also takes a while as it compiles PHP for you! It also installs PHPUnit 3.4 as that’s the version we need to unit test ZF1.

Each version of PHP that you compile is stored in /usr/local/php/{version number}. You can compile any version; I have 5.2.4, 5.2.12, 5.3.3 and 5.3.11 installed at the moment…

6. Select PHP to use:

   $ pe 5.3.11

pe is a handy shell function that Derick wrote that changes your PHP environment to whichever version your specify.

7. Run tests

   $ cd /vagrant/tests
   $ php runtests.php

Alternatively, you can run each component’s tests individually:

   $ phpunit --stderr -d memory_limit=-1 Zend/Acl/AclTest.php
   $ phpunit --stderr -d memory_limit=-1 Zend/Amf/AllTests.php
   (etc...)

Obviously, you repeat steps 5 through 7 for each version of PHP you want to test on.

To stop your Vagrant VM, exit the SSH shell and type `vagrant halt` or `vagrant suspend`. For more details on controlling your Vagrant VM, I recommend Lorna’s article

Running unit tests on Zend Framework 1 is now considerably easier!