I didn’t even know there were paid tweets available, but after I figured out it existed I decided to experiment with it. $25,- not much you’ll say. But $25,- for a Tweet, yes correct a TWEET, and someone with only 235 followers?! It’s weird to think that some companies are paying someone ANYTHING to tweet at all.

The reason why I am writing this post is because after my sponsored tweet got published, some of my followers started complaining about it. Personally, I think there is nothing wrong with tweeting for products I think my followers might find useful.  I don’t care about people’s haircut schedules, but I do care about useful and interesting things.

My sponsored tweet didn’t refer to any specific product, exept for the sponsoredtweets.com API, which is actually developer related information. Now if I would start tweeting about the latest age-defying serum for women over 50, yeah, you’re probably right, and I shouldn’t be tweeting such things at all.

Would you tweet a sponsored tweet if it contained relevant information, based on your followers list? According to some people it’s painful enough to get regular updates on your colleague feeding his cat. What if he started “spamming” your Twitter feed with product pitches? I’m not saying you should start stuffing your Twitter feed with advertisements, because you’ll lose followers one way or another. But can/would a fair amount of sponsored tweets do you any harm?

I’m interested in hearing your thoughts.

phpUnderControl is a popular open source addon for the continuous integration tool CruiseControl. In this blog post I’ll try to explain how you can setup phpUnderControl and CruiseControl. This guide is mostly focused on getting phpUnderControl to work on a Gentoo Linux system, so some things are OS specific.

Preparing the application

I’m assuming that you already have a working PHP setup, so I’ll skip that part. The first thing we need to do is to install the required packages. CruiseControl is a Java based application, so we need to do is install the JDK:

emerge dev-java/sun-jdk

The next step is to install Xdebug. At this time Gentoo still has Xdebug version 2.0.2 in its portage system, so this will require some fine tuning

emerge dev-php5/xdebug

After the package has been emerged, we will need to locate our xdebug ebuild file, so we run:

find /usr/portage -iname "xdebug-2.0.2.ebuild"

This will return the path of where the ebuild is located, and with this path we can create a new custom ebuild, based on the 2.0.2 version:

cp /usr/portage/dev-php5/xdebug/xdebug-2.0.2.ebuild /usr/portage/dev-php5/xdebug/xdebug-2.0.5.ebuild

Now we need to tell Gentoo that it should ignore our mirror list, and use the package url from the ebuild file:

nano /usr/portage/dev-php5/xdebug/xdebug-2.0.5.ebuild

and add the following line to the top of the file:

RESTRICT="mirror"

Save the file, and create the digest:

ebuild /usr/portage/dev-php5/xdebug/xdebug-2.0.5.ebuild digest

We will now have to do the exact same thing, but for the xdebug client.

cp /usr/portage/dev-php/xdebug-client/xdebug-client-2.0.2.ebuild /usr/portage/dev-php/xdebug-client/xdebug-client-2.0.5.ebuild
nano /usr/portage/dev-php/xdebug-client/xdebug-client-2.0.5.ebuild

and again we add the following line to the top of the file:

RESTRICT="mirror"

Save the file, and create the digest:

ebuild /usr/portage/dev-php/xdebug-client/xdebug-client-2.0.5.ebuild digest

Our custom ebuild for Xdebug 2.0.5 is now ready to be compiled, so let’s emerge it again:

emerge =dev-php5/xdebug-2.0.5

Once the build is done we should check if the proper Xdebug version is loaded. To do so, execute the following command:

php -v | grep Xdebug

If everything went well, you should see something like “with Xdebug v2.0.5, Copyright (c) 2002-2008, by Derick Rethans”. The version 2.0.5 is the important part here.

In the next step we need to install a couple of PEAR packages. I’m assuming you already have a working version of PEAR installed, or know how to set it up, as it’s fairly simple.

pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
pear install --alldeps phpunit/PHPUnit
pear install PHP_CodeSniffer
pear install --alldeps phpunit/phpUnderControl

Installing CruiseControl & phpUnderControl

In this part we will download the CruiseControl archive, and extract it

cd /opt
wget http://heanet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/cruisecontrol/cruisecontrol-bin-2.8.2.zip
unzip /opt/cruisecontrol-bin-2.8.2.zip
mv -f cruisecontrol-bin-2.8.2 cruisecontrol
phpuc install /usr/local/cruisecontrol

By default, cruisecontrol doesn’t have a start-up script, so let’s create it in /etc/init.d/cruisecontrol:

#!/sbin/runscript

PIDFILE=/opt/cruisecontrol/cc.pid

start() {
ebegin "Starting CruiseControl"
cd /opt/cruisecontrol/
./cruisecontrol.sh > /dev/null 2>&1
eend $?
}

stop() {
ebegin "Stopping CruiseControl"
start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE
rm -f $PIDFILE
eend $?
}

Set the file to have executable rights, and start the cruisecontrol server:

chmod +x /etc/init.d/cruisecontrol
/etc/init.d/cruisecontrol start

If everything worked, you should now be able to browse to http://yourhost:8080/dashboard/, and you should see a working cruisecontrol server page. If you don’t,  have a quick look at the cruisecontrol logs in /opt/cruisecontrol/cruisecontrol.log to find out what might be the problem.

Let’s stop the CruiseControl server for now:

 /etc/init.d/cruisecontrol stop

Adding your project to phpUnderControl

phpUnderControl ships with a command line tool which allows you to automatically create CruiseControl XML configuration files. The following example assumes that CruiseControl has been installed into /opt/cruisecontrol.

phpuc project --version-control svn --version-control-url svn://yourhost/trunk --test-case AllTests --test-file AllTests.php --test-dir tests --project-name ProjectName /usr/local/cruisecontrol

After you’ve run this comand, phpUnderControl will create a build file for you in /opt/cruisecontrol/projects/<projectname>/build.xml.
However, the file which phpUnderControl automatically creates for you is a little bit outdated. Fire it up with your favorite editor, and make sure it looks something like the following:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="ProjectName" default="build" basedir=".">
 <target name="build" depends="checkout,phpunit"/>
 <target name="checkout">
   <exec executable="svn" dir="${basedir}/source" failonerror="on">
     <arg line="up"/>
   </exec>
 </target>
 <target name="phpunit">
   <exec executable="phpunit" dir="${basedir}/source/tests" failonerror="on">
     <arg line="--log-junit ${basedir}/build/logs/phpunit.xml --coverage-html ${basedir}/build/coverage AllTests"/>
   </exec>
 </target>
</project>

You could now do a Ant testrun, and if it succeeds you can start the CruiseControl server again:

/opt/cruisecontrol/apache-ant-1.7.0/bin/ant -f /opt/cruisecontrol/projects/ProjectName/build.xml
/etc/init.d/cruisecontrol start

Go to http://yourhost.com:8080/cruisecontrol/, have a beer and celebrate. You are now ready use the full benefits of continuous integration.

Other resources

• Installing phpUnderControl on Debian etch
• Setting up phpUnderControl