PHP Project set-up using GNU make Makefile

This aims to be a starting point for your new PHP project. It defines tasks which are common to most of the PHP projects as Makefile targets.

Usage

1. clone this repository
2. run make (this will install dependencies and run the linter and tests).
3. run make list to see other targets.

After that, you may want to have a look at the Makefile itself, and adopt it to your project.

About build tools and task runners

As PHP is a dynamic language without compilation, there was not much need for a tool like Make. Since some years though, the set-ups even for PHP projects have become more complex. As a result, there are many Task runners available. In PHP, a good one of those is robo.li.

What they (normally) don't provide, is the declaration of dependencies, which allow to run an incremental build (where the "build" could actually be any kind of task). If the build tool knows this dependencies, it can skip commands which would produce the same output as before, because the sources are the same. This is a very important feature of more traditional build tools like Make.

Why Make (and not phing, ant, ...)

First of all, as described above, I want a tool which knows the dependency graph of my application. Depending on the application, it could make sense to use a task runner (robo.li, or one of the JavaScript task runners, which provide very useful tools for frontend development) in addition to a "real" build tool.

I don't like the xml declaration style used by build tools like ant or phing. In my opinion, the syntax of a Makefile is much more readable and concise (once you got used to the few automatic variables).

Another reason is that you can define commands which are directly executed in a shell. For common tasks, such as file-system operations, this is much easier and faster than using PHP. The downside of course is, that it doesn't work on every platform (if you don't be very careful which commands you use).

Features

The Makefile target which are intended to be used from the command line, are listed by make list:

$ make list

Useful targets:

  test         > run linter and tests (default target)
  phplint      > run php linter (php -l)
  phpspec      > run phpspec

  setup        > install composer dependencies
  deps_update  > explicitly update dependencies (composer update)
  clean        > stop server, clean tmp files and vendor dir
  clean_tmp    > clean temporary files (and stop server)
  clean_vendor > remove vendor dir

  server_start > start dev server
  server_stop  > stop dev server

The dependencies of each target (prerequisites in make terminology) are declared very carefully, so that you can run make test and only the out-of-date targets are updated. Examples:

• You can directly start with make test (or just make, as test is the default target). It sees that the composer dependencies are not yet installed, and runs composer install.
• make test does not do anything, if you have not updated any source files.
• make phplint only lints the modified source files.

There are a few PHP files included, but only as an example project. The idea is to not limit you on your choices regarding frameworks, project structure, and so on. The only choice which is done, is the testing tool, which is phpspec. This allows to show a useful implementation of a test target. It should be very easy to use phpunit instead: just change the dependency in the composer.json and modify the phpspec target to call phpunit instead.