Chapter 3. Setting Up the Environment

This chapter might give you the impression of doing a system administrator's job. It is all about setting up a few accounts and configuring functionality for Continuous Integration (CI).

First, we will take a look at the definition of CI and understand why it is not a luxury anymore, rather, a must have feature in any project. Then, we will see how to utilize Amazon Web Services to set up a test and deployment server.

We will use Jenkins as a CI application and show you how to integrate it into your Amazon Web Services account, install required plugins to test PHP projects, and finally, prepare our Symfony project to benefit from the whole infrastructure.

When everything is set up properly, we will create a simple testing code and watch how CI does the rest of the jobs: running tests, generating reports, and deploying the application automatically.

As you may have guessed, we won't have much Symfony development in this chapter. However, once CI is in place, we will see how easy, elegant, and professional the rest of our journey will be.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics: