<p>In the last couple of days I have been playing around with the idea of combining GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages to be able to dynamically build preview environments every time a pull request is opened against a repository hosting a client-side web app.</p><p>The idea is that you can quickly preview the changes made by some contributor, without having to clone their branch and running everything locally, something specially useful for open source projects.</p><p>In this article I will explain how to set everything up, and what are some considerations and problems you may face during the process.</p><h3>Enable github pages</h3><p>The first thing you need to do is enable your project to publish pages on some branch. I recommend creating a new branch for this, let&#x27;s say <code>preview-env</code>, and then enabling publishing on it.</p><p>In order to do that go to your repository and then <strong>Settings</strong> -&gt; <strong>Pages</strong>, look for the <strong>Source</strong> section, and you should see something like this:</p><p><img src="/assets/img/preview-envs/github-pages-before-enabling.png" alt="GitHub pages before enabling"/></p><p>Click in the dropdown and select your new branch, <code>preview-env</code>. Then click <strong>Save</strong>.</p><p><img src="/assets/img/preview-envs/github-pages-after-enabling.png" alt="GitHub pages after enabling"/></p><p>After saving you will see a message at the top of this section telling you what&#x27;s the URL in which the pages are published. It always follows the same pattern. If your organization is <code>my-org</code> and your repository is <code>my-repo</code>, the url will be <code>https://my-org.github.io/my-repo/</code>.</p><h3>Configure the workflow</h3><p>Now we need to configure a workflow that will &quot;deploy&quot; the preview environment for the branch every time a new pull request is created or updated:</p><p>Let&#x27;s imagine we have a React web app that is built with node.js. The configuration could look like this.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-yml"># .github/workflows/deploy-preview.yml
name: Deploy preview

on:
  pull_request: null

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-20.04
    continue-on-error: true
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Use node.js 14.15
        uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: 14.15
      - name: Generate slug
        id: generate_slug
        run: echo &quot;##[set-output name=slug;]$(echo ${GITHUB_HEAD_REF#refs/heads/} | sed -r &#x27;s/[~\^]+//g&#x27; | sed -r &#x27;s/[^a-zA-Z0-9]+/-/g&#x27; | sed -r &#x27;s/^-+\|-+$//g&#x27; | tr A-Z a-z)&quot;
      - name: Build
        run: npm ci &amp;&amp; npm run build
      - name: Deploy
        uses: JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action@4.1.1
        with:
          branch: preview-env
          folder: build
          target-folder: ${{ steps.generate_slug.outputs.slug }}
      - name: Publish env
        uses: marocchino/sticky-pull-request-comment@v2
        with:
          header: Preview environment
          message: |
            ## Preview environment
            https://my-org.github.io/my-repo/${{ steps.generate_slug.outputs.slug }}/
</code></pre></pre><blockquote><p>If you are not familiar with GitHub Actions yet, take a look at the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://docs.github.com/en/actions">official documentation</a>.</p></blockquote><p>This workflow will follow the next steps:</p><ul><li>Checkout the code from the repository.</li><li>Set-up node.js 14.15</li><li>Based on the branch name, generate a slug that we will use to have separated deployment folders for every pull request we receive. The slug is exposed to next steps as an output.</li><li>Build the project. This step will obviously depend on the needs of your project.</li><li>Using <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action">JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action</a>, deploy the contents we previously built in the GitHub page, under a sub-folder matching the slug we generated a few steps above, and under the branch <code>preview-env</code> (remember we enabled GitHub pages for this branch).</li><li>Finally, using <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/marocchino/sticky-pull-request-comment">marocchino/sticky-pull-request-comment</a>, post a comment in the pull request with a link to the preview environment, so that you can just click on it and see the deployment.</li></ul><p>The steps may change depending on your needs and how you build your project. For example, I have an extra step to update a property in the <code>package.json</code> that is then used to allow serving the app in a sub-path instead of the root of the domain.</p><p>You may also not build your site with node.js, as you could be using any of the multiple existing static site generators out there, but you get the idea.</p><p>Finally, you have probably noticed the config includes <code>continue-on-error: true</code>. This will allow the pull request to be merged even if this process fails for some reason.</p><h3>Considerations when using forks</h3><p>While the configuration above will work perfectly when creating pull requests inside the same repository, there are some limitations when the pull request comes from a fork (which is the usual in OSS projects).</p><p>For security reasons, the <code>GITHUB_TOKEN</code> injected in those cases doesn&#x27;t have write permissions, which will make the &quot;deploy&quot; step fail.</p><p>Also, you cannot define your own token with more permissions and inject it as a secret, as the secrets are not exposed to workflows running on forks.</p><p>However, with a couple small config changes, we can work around these limitations:</p><h4>Change event</h4><p>The first thing we need to do is use the <code>pull_request_target</code> event instead of the <code>pull_request</code> one.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-diff">on:
-  pull_request: null
+  pull_request_target: null
</code></pre></pre><p>According to the documentation, this is equivalent to the <code>pull_request</code> event, but it runs in the scope of the base repository.</p><p>Thanks to this, the <code>GITHUB_TOKEN</code> will come with write permissions, and we will have access to secrets if needed.</p><h4>Checkout the fork</h4><p>The second thing we are going to change is that we now need to specify the repository to checkout.</p><p>In order to do that, we need to add two inputs to the &quot;Checkout code&quot; step, like this:</p><pre><pre><code class="language-diff">    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
+       with:
+         repository: ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.repo.full_name }}
+         ref: ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.ref }}
</code></pre></pre><p>This will ensure we checkout from the fork repository, instead of the base one, which is the default, as it&#x27;s the one where the <code>pull_request_target</code> event is scoped to.</p><p>And that&#x27;s it. With these two changes you can now deploy preview environments for pull requests coming from forks.</p><blockquote><p><strong>IMPORTANT!</strong> The limitations of the <code>pull_request</code> event are there for a reason. People could potentially get access to your secrets or manipulate your code. Proceed at your own risk.</p></blockquote><h3>Other considerations</h3><p>Other than the limitations for forks, there are a few other minor things to take into consideration.</p><ul><li>Changes in GitHub Pages do not reflect immediately. It may take up to a couple of minutes for the deployment to be available, but considering you will usually not review a PR right after it has been created, this should not be a big issue.</li><li>As you have seen, every time a pull request is created, the deployment will generate a new folder in your GitHub Pages branch. This may result in a lot of old folders to pile-up, so you may want to set up some way to clean them up periodically or after the pull request has been merged.</li><li>Due to the fact that GitHub Pages only allows static pages to be served, this process cannot be used with apps that require some kind of back-end or server-side logic.</li><li>If your project is already using GitHub Pages for something else (serve the project&#x27;s website or docs), that may conflict with this, preventing you from having this kind of preview envs.</li></ul>

Setting-up a preview environment for your client-side apps with GitHub Actions and GitHub Pages

<p>I remember many years ago, when I released my first open source project, that every time I had a new release ready, I was never sure what should be the new version number.</p><p>Versioning software is not as straightforward as it might look when you don&#x27;t have a lot of experience.</p><p>In this article I&#x27;ll try to explain the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://semver.org/">SemVer</a> approach to version software, and some things you might want to take into account on top of that.</p><h3>Semantic Versioning</h3><p>The first thing you need is a solid set of rules that help you decide which should your next version be.</p><p>I remember thinking <em>&quot;is this version big enough as to jump from 1.0 to 2.0?&quot;</em> or <em>&quot;I have seen projects using three numbers for the version, X.Y.Z, should I do the same?&quot;</em></p><p>Those questions are easier to answer if you stick to some standard that tells you what to do, and that will help others more easily understand your intention.</p><p>My recommendation is to use <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://semver.org/">Semantic Versioning</a>, as it defines a solid starting point, and it&#x27;s quite adopted by the community.</p><p>Semantic Versioning states that you should use three numbers to identify versions, <code>MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH</code>, and follow these rules in order to decide which one to increase:</p><ul><li><code>PATCH</code>: the new release includes only bug fixes. People are encouraged to update to this release and no changes are needed in their code bases.</li><li><code>MINOR</code>: the new release includes new backwards-compatible features. People can update to this version without changing their code bases, and make use of the new features afterwards if they wish.</li><li><code>MAJOR</code>: the new release includes <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backward_compatibility">backward compatibility</a> breaks. Changes in the code base will be needed when updating to this version.</li></ul><blockquote><p>These rules are easier to apply to libraries and frameworks than it is for apps and services. More about this later.</p></blockquote><h3>Try to keep backwards-compatibility</h3><p>Ok, we have some rules now. However, I have seen very frequently people mistaking what <em>can</em> be done with what <em>should</em> be done.</p><p>Yes, if you introduce a breaking change, you can update the major version and that&#x27;s it. However, if you do it too frequently, people won&#x27;t be happy, and you will end up with a fragmented user base, that stop updating to newer versions.</p><p>I remember using a library to deploy stuff that had a new major version every couple of months, changing things like &quot;The <code>host</code> function is now called <code>server</code>&quot;. Yes, ok, but why do I have to change my stuff so frequently.</p><p>It&#x27;s usually better to try to implement things in a backwards-compatible way, and keep track of the things you want to change and do it all at a time.</p><p>You can also deprecate things, and document the way you want those things to be done moving forward. That way you give people the chance to start changing their code and simplify a hypothetical upcoming major release.</p><h3>Provide clear upgrade paths</h3><p>As mentioned above, too frequent major version changes are not desirable, but sooner or later you will want to release a new major version for different reasons.</p><ul><li>Getting rid of that feature which is hard to maintain, introduces lots of bugs, and provides little value.</li><li>Supporting something new which is very hard to implement without breaking backwards compatibility.</li><li>Removing all those deprecated methods you have been dragging for months.</li><li>Fix design issues, where something was architected in the wrong way, and only spotted after some time.</li></ul><p>At the time this happens you will want your users to upgrade to the newer version, as you don&#x27;t want people to report bugs that only affect older versions, or to expect you to backport fixes to older versions because they haven&#x27;t updated to the new one.</p><p>The best way to achieve this is to provide clear and simple upgrade paths:</p><ul><li><p>Prepare your releases for the things to come: If you want to introduce new ways of doing things, do it before the major release, and deprecate the older ones. For example, you can have a new method that gets called by an older one, while you mark the old one as deprecated.</p><p>People will be more willing to update and change their code afterwards. By the time the major release is published, their code will be ready to upgrade.</p></li><li><p>Include a CHANGELOG file in your project, explaining the changes introduced in every version. A very good way to document a change log is the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://keepachangelog.com/">Keep a changelog</a> initiative.</p><p>You can also use some other platform to document the change log, like GitHub releases.</p></li><li><p>Include documentation on how to upgrade to a major release: This is probably the most important one. Document all the steps that need to be followed and all the required changes to update from a release to the next major one.</p><p>A good way to do this is by including an UPGRADE file in your project. You can see <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/acmailer/acmailer/blob/main/UPGRADE.md">this example</a>.</p></li></ul><h3>Versioning libraries vs apps</h3><p>Semantic Versioning is a good standard to version software, but it plays much better with libraries and frameworks that are installed using some kind of package manager, than it does with apps and services that are not directly depended on.</p><p>For example, how do you identify a backward compatibility break on a web user interface?</p><p>With this kind of software there are more grey areas, and you will end up using your intuition.</p><p>For example, not long ago I released a <a href="/2020/12/24/released-shlink-web-client-v3-0-0/">new major version</a> for a web app I maintain, and it was completely compatible with the previous one. However, it introduced a larger amount of features than usual, and big UI changes, so I decided it was worth the bump.</p><p>Because of this there are projects that use different approaches to version apps. For example:</p><ul><li>Firefox and Chrome have 6-week cycles, and after each one of them they release a new major version no matter what.</li><li>Jetbrains publishes a few releases of their IDEs every year (I think 3) which always start with the year they were released on, like <code>2020.3.0</code>, and they increase the patch number for bugfixes.</li><li>Ubuntu releases 2 versions every year, one in April and one in October, and they are always identified by the year and month they were released on, like <code>19.04</code> or <code>20.10</code>.</li></ul><h3>Special versions</h3><p>There&#x27;s also a set of special versions that can be used to publish the so-called <strong>pre-release</strong> versions. These <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://semver.org/#spec-item-9">are covered</a> by Semantic Versioning, but sometimes they are not so easy to understand.</p><p>It is also very likely that you never have to use these, as only relatively big projects will need this level of granularity, but it&#x27;s still good to know what&#x27;s their purpose and what do they imply.</p><h4>0.x.y</h4><p>It is possible to release a version of your software where the major number is <code>0</code>. When this happens, it means your software is still in its early stages.</p><p>It does not mean it&#x27;s necessarily unstable, but it means you are still introducing frequent changes on it, and therefore, it might be a bit more fragile than a version starting with a number greater than <code>0</code>.</p><h4>Alpha</h4><p>The intention of an alpha release is that a subset of people con test some new functionality, but you don&#x27;t want people to use it in production</p><p>Alpha versions are on their very early stages. Their public API is very likely to change, and they probably contain bugs.</p><p>Semantic Versioning states that alpha versions are identified by this pattern: <code>MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH-alpha.NUMBER</code>, for example <code>2.0.0-alpha.1</code>.</p><h4>Beta</h4><p>Similar to alpha versions, beta versions are also prone to contain bugs, but their API will in theory not change. That means that you could potentially adapt your software to start using a beta version, and when the corresponding stable release is published, you shouldn&#x27;t need that many changes.</p><p>Semantic Versioning defines a pattern similar to the one for alpha versions: <code>MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH-beta.NUMBER</code>, for example <code>2.0.0-beta.1</code>.</p><h4>Release candidate</h4><p>Release candidates (RC) are pre-release versions that you will want to publish for the general user-base to test an upcoming release. You want to publish a RC so that it&#x27;s battle tested by as many people as possible, in order to find possible bugs and edge cases.</p><p>They should not contain many bugs, but some could be found. The public API should not change anymore.</p><p>According to Semantic Versioning, the pattern to identify a RC is <code>MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH-rc.NUMBER</code>, for example <code>2.0.0-rc.1</code>.</p><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>We have seen some approaches and considerations to properly version your software.</p><p>Versioning is not so straightforward when you don&#x27;t have a lot of experience, but as you have seen, you just need to know a small set of rules and use a bit your intuition.</p><p>With those tools, you will be able to properly version your software.</p>

What to take into account when versioning software

<p>Two days ago I released the first major version in almost 2 years for <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/shlinkio/shlink-web-client">shlink-web-client</a>, a web UI for <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://shlink.io">shlink</a>, my self-hosted URL shortener.</p><p>This new version introduces several improvements to the project, and I thought it was worth writing a post to explain all of them in depth.</p><h3>New design</h3><p>The project has been using the same design almost since the beginning. It was clean, but it laked a bit of contrast and consistency in many sections.</p><p>Now the main background is light-gray, with components composed in white cards with a slight box shadow, that makes them easier to spot inside the app.</p><p>Also, the main area has now a max-width that prevents components from stretching too much on wide screens.</p><div class="row"><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="Before" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/design-before.png" class="gallery-item"/><p class="text-center"><small>Before</small></p></div><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="After" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/design-after.png" class="gallery-item"/><p class="text-center"><small>After</small></p></div></div><h3>Overview page</h3><p>Up until now, after connecting to a Shlink server, you went directly to the list of short URLs.</p><p>With this new version, you now see an overview page first, which displays some general stats, a quick short URL creation form, and the latest 5 short URLs.</p><p>From there, you can navigate to the full list of short URLs, with filtering capabilities, or go to the advanced short URL creation form.</p><div class="row"><div class="col-md-8 col-md-offset-2 "><img alt="Overview" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/overview.png" class="gallery-item"/><p class="text-center"><small>Overview</small></p></div></div><h3>Improved short URL creation form</h3><p>One of the sections with more room for improvement was the short URL creation form. It had all the inputs mixed, displaying just the &quot;long url&quot; one, with the option to un-collapsing the rest at will.</p><p>The new design groups the inputs by context, which makes it more clear. It also displays the inputs all the time, since the &quot;quick form&quot; is now located in the overview page.</p><div class="row"><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="Before" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/creation-form-before.png" class="gallery-item"/><p class="text-center"><small>Before</small></p></div><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="After" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/creation-form-after.png" class="gallery-item"/><p class="text-center"><small>After</small></p></div></div><h3>Enhanced visits page</h3><p>The visits page had a problem, it was trying to display too much information in a single place.</p><ul><li>Visits over time</li><li>Visits from every platform</li><li>Visits from every location</li><li>A list of visits as a table</li></ul><p>The new approach splits those in subsections with their own sub-route each (<code>/by-location</code>, <code>/by-context</code>, etc). This helps to render a smaller amount of charts at once, since they are a bit CPU greedy.</p><p>Also, only the visits from the last 30 days are loaded by default, making it load way faster for URLs with a lot of visits.</p><div class="row"><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="Before" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/visits-before.png" class="gallery-item"/><p class="text-center"><small>Before</small></p></div><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="After" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/visits-after.png" class="gallery-item"/><p class="text-center"><small>After</small></p></div></div><h3>Outer sections</h3><p>The app has some sections which are not related to a specific server, like creating/editing servers, or the settings page.</p><p>These sections have also been adapted to the new style, and they also have a max-width for wide screens.</p><div class="row"><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="Before" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/create-server-before.png" class="gallery-item"/><p class="text-center"><small>Before</small></p></div><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="After" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/create-server-after.png" class="gallery-item"/><p class="text-center"><small>After</small></p></div></div><h3>Date range selector</h3><p>A new component allows selecting date ranges either by relative time ranges (last 30 days, last 90 days...) or by selecting absolute start and end dates.</p><p>This component is used to filter both short URL lists and visits lists.</p><div class="row"><div class="col-md-6  col-md-offset-3"><img alt="Date range selector" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/date-range-selector.png" class=""/><p class="text-center"><small>Date range selector</small></p></div></div><h3>Domain selector</h3><p>Shlink has had multi-domain support for some versions, but changing the domain from the web client required to set the value manually, which is a bit error-prone.</p><p>This version introduces a new component which allows selecting from domains already used in the past (which is what you will want in most of the cases), preventing accidental typos.</p><p>It also allows setting new values in case you want to use a new domain that you never used before. This domain will then appear in the list the next time.</p><div class="row"><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="Existing domains" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/domains-existing.png" class=""/><p class="text-center"><small>Existing domains</small></p></div><div class="col-md-6  "><img alt="New domain" src="/assets/img/shlink-web-client-3/domains-new.png" class=""/><p class="text-center"><small>New domain</small></p></div></div><h3>Other improvements</h3><p>The changes described so far were the major ones. However, v3.0.0 includes a few other minor improvements.</p><ul><li>Result and loading messages have been standardized: They are now more consistent and use the same set of components, which also ensures consistency in the future.</li><li>Error messages are now more descriptive: Instead of showing generic error messages when API calls fail, the actual error message is now always displayed, so that it&#x27;s easier to know what failed.</li><li>Dropped support for Shlink v1: All major versions come with some breaking changes that improve code maintainability. This one drops Shlink v1 support, which allows removing some conditional paths here and there.</li></ul><p>Other than the last point, Shlink v3.0.0 is mostly backwards compatible, so it&#x27;s safe to upgrade if you are already using Shlink v2.x</p><h3>Next steps</h3><p>Of course this doesn&#x27;t end here, and I have a lot of ideas to improve it even further.</p><ul><li>Dark theme: It&#x27;s what the cool kids do these days, and I have already done some experiments around it.</li><li>Shlink dashboard: Next gen web app for Shlink. You can read the whole reasoning in <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/shlinkio/shlink-web-client/issues/338">this issue</a>.</li><li>Filtering in lists added to URL: Many sections allow filtering lists, but the state is saved in memory, which means it gets lost if the page is refreshed, and it cannot be bookmarked. The intention is to make all filtering params to become part of the URL.</li><li>Exporting visits in CSV: It&#x27;s cool to see charts full of info, but sometimes admins need to feed other services with the data, and consuming the original API is not always an option. Exporting visits to a CSV file will be supported soon by shlink-web-client.</li></ul>

Released shlink-web-client v3.0.0

<p>Let&#x27;s not deny that <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/features/actions">GitHub actions</a> are hitting hard in the tech community, and many projects are transitioning from other continuous integration systems like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://circleci.com/">Circle CI</a> or <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://travis-ci.org/">Travis CI</a>.</p><p>Personally I have been using Travis a lot during the past years, for all my OSS projects, and I have gotten very used to it.</p><p>However, people seem to be &quot;abandoning&quot; travis in favor of GitHub Actions, for different reasons. &quot;It&#x27;s faster&quot;, &quot;I can run smaller tasks in parallel&quot;, etc.</p><p>In my case, I have moved a few very specific tasks there, where travis was becoming a bottleneck, but I still have mixed feelings about the very-verbose yaml-based config needed to configure a few GitHub Actions, compared to the more concise travis one.</p><p>In this article I&#x27;ll explain how I improved a travis build to run several smaller tasks in parallel jobs, without having to completely move away from it.</p><h3>Initial state</h3><p>This project&#x27;s travis config is relatively simple. It is used to build a JS project for the web browser, and it has to run the next tasks:</p><ul><li>Lint the code, to make sure it fulfils the project&#x27;s coding standards.</li><li>Run unit tests.</li><li>Run mutation tests.</li><li>Build the docker image, to make sure none of the new changes broke it.</li><li>Conditionally publish a release on GitHub, with a dist file attached to it, if the build is being run for a git tag.</li></ul><pre><pre><code class="language-yaml">dist: bionic

language: node_js

branches:
  only:
    - /.*/

cache:
  directories:
    - node_modules

services:
  - docker

node_js:
  - &#x27;12.16.3&#x27;

install: npm ci

before_script:
  - echo &quot;Building commit range ${TRAVIS_COMMIT_RANGE}&quot;
  - export MUTATION_FILES=$(git diff ${TRAVIS_COMMIT_RANGE:-origin/main} --name-only | grep -E &#x27;src\/(.*).(ts|tsx)$&#x27; | paste -sd &quot;,&quot;)

script:
  - npm run lint
  - npm run test:ci
  - npm run mutate:ci
  - docker build -t project:test .

after_success:
  - node_modules/.bin/ocular coverage/clover.xml

before_deploy: npm run build ${TRAVIS_TAG#?}

deploy:
  - provider: releases
    api_key:
      secure: &lt;key&gt;
    file: &quot;./dist/project_${TRAVIS_TAG#?}_dist.zip&quot;
    skip_cleanup: true
    on:
      tags: true
</code></pre></pre><h3>Problems with this approach</h3><p>This is more or less ok, but the last two commands in <code>script</code> can be relatively slow and can delay the whole process.</p><p>Also, specially the mutation tests one, which is currently always considered successful regardless the result, can make the build reach the maximum run time allowed by travis, making the whole build falsely fail.</p><blockquote><p>The reason for the <code>before_script</code> step is to determine which source code files changed, and run mutation tests on them only, in order to mitigate this.</p></blockquote><p>Other than this, the build config defines &quot;global&quot; customizations that are actually only used for some tasks:</p><ul><li>Running <code>npm ci</code> is not required for the <code>docker build</code> task.</li><li>Getting the <code>docker</code> service is not required by any of the other tasks.</li><li>Determining changed files is only used by the <code>mutation tests</code> task.</li></ul><h3>Making use of jobs</h3><p>One cool feature travis supports is the use of a job <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/build-matrix/">build matrix</a>, that lets you define multiple jobs that run in parallel as part of the same build, and make each one of them do unrelated tasks.</p><p>Using this feature it is possible to improve the <code>.travis.yml</code> file, making it look like this:</p><pre><pre><code class="language-yaml">dist: bionic

language: node_js

branches:
  only:
    - /.*/

cache:
  directories:
    - node_modules

node_js:
  - &#x27;12.16.3&#x27;

jobs:
  fast_finish: true
  allow_failures:
    - name: &#x27;Mutation tests&#x27;
  include:

    - name: &#x27;Lint&#x27;
      install: npm ci
      script: npm run lint

    - name: &#x27;Unit tests&#x27;
      install: npm ci
      script: npm run test:ci
      after_success:
        - node_modules/.bin/ocular coverage/clover.xml

    - name: &#x27;Mutation tests&#x27;
      install: npm ci
      before_script:
        - echo &quot;Building commit range ${TRAVIS_COMMIT_RANGE}&quot;
        - export MUTATION_FILES=$(git diff ${TRAVIS_COMMIT_RANGE:-origin/main} --name-only | grep -E &#x27;src\/(.*).(ts|tsx)$&#x27; | paste -sd &quot;,&quot;)
      script: npm run mutate:ci

    - name: &#x27;Build docker image&#x27;
      services:
        - docker
      install: skip
      script: docker build -t project:test .

    - name: &#x27;Publish release&#x27;
      if: tag IS present
      install: skip
      script: skip
      before_deploy: npm run build ${TRAVIS_TAG#?}
      deploy:
        - provider: releases
          api_key:
            secure: &lt;key&gt;
          file: &quot;./dist/project_${TRAVIS_TAG#?}_dist.zip&quot;
          skip_cleanup: true
          on:
            tags: true
</code></pre></pre><p>This approach introduces all these benefits:</p><ul><li>Now linting, testing, mutation testing and building the docker image run in parallel, making the build finish earlier.</li><li>The mutation testing step is allowed to fail, and thanks to the <code>fast_finish</code> flag, travis won&#x27;t even wait for it to finish, considering the build successful once the rest have passed.</li><li>Configs that are only meaningful for certain jobs are defined in the job itself, instead of globally.</li><li>The &quot;publish release&quot; job only runs conditionally if the build is for a tag, thanks to the <code>if: tag IS present</code> condition. (More info about <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/conditional-builds-stages-jobs/">conditional jobs</a> in travis).</li><li>As soon as any of the jobs fails, the whole build fails and you don&#x27;t have to continue waiting. Before this, if the third task failed, you still had to wait for the previous two to finish.</li><li>Each job can have a name, making it more clear in travis UI what tasks are being run:</li></ul><p><img src="/assets/img/travis-multiple-jobs/travis-jobs.png" alt="Travis CI jobs"/></p><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>The main purpose of this article was to showcase that travis still has a lot to give. Github Actions are definitely cool, but there&#x27;s usually no silver bullet for everything, and a combination with other tools might be more suitable.</p><p>Also, this allows people using travis to improve their builds without having to change everything. Then, once you have split your tasks, if you still want to move to Github Actions, it should be easier.</p><blockquote><p>If you are curious, this is the project in which I use this travis configuration: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/shlinkio/shlink-web-client">shlinkio/shlink-web-client</a>.</p></blockquote>

Running several steps of a Travis CI build in parallel

<p>Asynchronous and non-blocking runtimes are pretty usual in many programming languages, as well as long-lived web apps that stay in memory and are capable of dispatching multiple HTTP requests without having to be fully bootstrapped every time. This has not been traditionally the case with PHP apps. </p><p>However, many projects are starting to get some adoption, that bring this long-lived approach to the PHP world.</p><p>The problem with this is that PHP developers are not used to this, and they tend to continue acting as they have always done. Also, libraries might have made some assumptions, making them not work as expected when used under this context.</p><p>Some of these projects are <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.swoole.co.uk">swoole</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://reactphp.org/">ReactPHP</a> or <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://amphp.org/">Amphp</a>, to give some examples.</p><p>In this article, I will be focusing on the first one, and explain how to approach some of the pain points I have found after using it for a year and a half on an <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/shlinkio/shlink">existing PHP project</a>.</p><h3>Introducing Swoole</h3><p>The main difference swoole has compared to other similar projects is that it&#x27;s written as a native PHP extension, and needs to be installed with <code>pecl</code>.</p><p>This is obviously a bit cumbersome, but the benefit is that, since it&#x27;s written in C++, it has a better handling of memory allocation, which is very important to achieve what it tries to do.</p><p>What swoole does is running a main process which bootstraps the PHP application once, and then keeps it in memory so that it can continue dispatching requests without having to load resources every time. This makes it really fast.</p><p>Those HTTP requests are handled by a set of child processes called &quot;web workers&quot;. Swoole forks the contents in memory for the main process to each one of the workers, so each worker has a &quot;copy&quot; of the application in memory.</p><p>Each worker is independent, but each one of them can only handle one request at a time, so you have to increase the number of workers if you expect a lot of concurrent traffic.</p><p>Other than web workers, swoole also has another set of child processes called &quot;task workers&quot;, which can be used to delegate long tasks at runtime to prevent web workers from getting blocked.</p><p>Here you can see a diagram of swoole&#x27;s architecture.</p><p><img src="https://www.swoole.co.uk/images/how-swoole-works.png" alt="How Swoole works"/></p><blockquote><p>More information can be found in <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.swoole.co.uk/how-it-works">Swoole&#x27;s website</a>.</p></blockquote><h3>Problems to solve</h3><p>Now that we know how swoole works, let&#x27;s see some of the challanges I have faced in th past, which are usually not that ovbious when you are used to think in terms of &quot;blocking&quot; and &quot;short-lived&quot;.</p><h4>Database connections are kept open</h4><p>One of the first things you find out is that, since the application stays in memory, any database connection that has been opened by a worker (either web or task worker), will be kept open and reused in subsequent executions or HTTP requests served by the app.</p><p>This, which is in theory good, has a side effect, which is not obvious during development: <strong>the opened connection will eventually expire</strong>.</p><p>Since most of the popular database abstraction layers in PHP are coming from the times in which PHP was just a bootstrap-on-every-request technology, they never cared too much about expired database connections, as they would be opened again on next request.</p><p>However, when using swoole and the like, you have to implement some mechanism which takes care of reconnecting or gracefully recovering when this happens.</p><blockquote><p>I wrote an article explaining how I solved this on a middleware-based app served with swoole and using doctrine: <a href="/2019/11/04/how-to-properly-handle-a-doctrine-entity-manager-on-an-expressive-application-served-with-swoole/">How to properly handle a doctrine entity manager on an expressive application served with swoole</a></p></blockquote><p>Obviously, swoole (and also others) provides some tools to work with databases (like this <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.swoole.co.uk/docs/modules/swoole-async-mysql-client">MySQL client</a>), which I&#x27;m sure do not have this problem (although, I haven&#x27;t personally tried this), but they are more limited than other well adopted libraries.</p><h4>In-memory caches don&#x27;t behave as expected</h4><p>It is a frequent practice to use local in-memory caches, like APCu, to improve applications performance in production.</p><p>Usually APCu is faster than other options, like redis or memcached, so it&#x27;s the choice when you only have one instance of your app running (meaning, you don&#x27;t have a cluster behind a load balancer).</p><p>However, even if you are running your app on just one server with swoole, because of the web worker system explained earlier, you actually have several copies of your app in memory, and each one of them will have a separated and not shared cache when using APCu.</p><p>This can lead to inconsistencies which are hard to debug, so you need to have it in mind.</p><p>Also, since the information that is being loaded is kept in memory anyway, you will not notice such a big improvement by using APCu or other in-memory caches.</p><blockquote><p>Notice that this problem does not happen when using distributed/centralized caching solutions, such as redis or memcached, as in that case, the caching technology is shared by all workers.</p></blockquote><h4>No need to optimize file including/requiring</h4><p>Many projects have complex configuration systems which are spread into several files. While this make it more maintainable, it also has a performance impact when all those files need to be loaded on every request.</p><p>Because of that, there are libraries like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/laminas/laminas-config-aggregator">laminas-config-aggregator</a> that can dynamically load config from many sources and, if some conditions are met, they can merge the result in a single bigger file that can be used in later requests.</p><p>In the case of swoole, as all the files will be kept in memory once loaded for the first time, there&#x27;s no need for this kind of optimization.</p><h4>Class autoloading happens once</h4><p>This point is very related with the previous one.</p><p>Composer offers a lot of optimization options so that class autoloading is faster in production. While you usually will still want to use some of those so that the first time a class is being loaded it is still reasonably fast, any subsequent hits will just use the class which is already in memory.</p><p>One of the composer flags you will probably don&#x27;t want use with swoole is <code>--apcu-autoloader</code>, because of the reasons mentioned two points above this one.</p><h4>Services should be truly stateless</h4><p>This is something that you should always do anyway, but it&#x27;s specially important when a service instance is kept in memory between HTTP requests.</p><p>Sometimes it&#x27;s easy to end up having some small piece of internal state on a service, where we save something as a side effect of a method call, to end up using it when another one of the public methods is invoked.</p><p>While this could seem harmless when the whole app is bootstrapped on every request, it can have very dangerous side effects when the app is served with swoole, because the instance will persist until another request is dispatched by the same web worker.</p><p>Just imagine you saved some user data on a service, and it ends up being served to another user on the next request. That won&#x27;t look good.</p><p>Because of this, make sure your services are truly stateless, and if for any reason that&#x27;s not possible, at least remember to have some mechanism in place that flushes the data just before finishing the request.</p><h4>Hot reloading for dev envs is not that good</h4><p>One thing we usually take for granted is that we can modify a PHP file and just by making a new request, the new code will be executed. However, when the code is kept in memory, it&#x27;s not that straightforward.</p><p>When you are developing a project which is served with swoole, you will have to restart the server every time to get your changes applied.</p><p>Swoole has a mechanism to do a light server reload, which is faster. You can find the docs in <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.swoole.co.uk/docs/modules/swoole-server-reload">it&#x27;s website</a>.</p><p>The problem with this is that you need to implement the mechanism to invoke that when a file is changed, or use some library that does it for you.</p><p>Also, I have noticed that even calling that and seeing that the server is reloaded, does not always have the expected effect, and you have to still end up doing a hard reload. It&#x27;s something I don&#x27;t fully understand and I still need to investigate a bit further.</p><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>As it always happens when new technologies appear, it takes some time to get used to them, but I strongly suggest you to give a try to swoole or any other non-blocking runtime, because it makes your apps super fast.</p><p>Just remember to have all of the above in mind ;-)</p><p>That said, here you can find some libraries that will make your life easier when trying to serve existing projects with swoole, without having to couple with it and being able to continue using your favourite framework:</p><ul><li>IDE helper: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/swoft-cloud/swoole-ide-helper">https://github.com/swoft-cloud/swoole-ide-helper</a></li><li>Mezzio (formerly Zend Expressive): <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/mezzio/mezzio-swoole">https://github.com/mezzio/mezzio-swoole</a></li><li>Symfony: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/k911/swoole-bundle">https://github.com/k911/swoole-bundle</a></li><li>Laravel: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/swooletw/laravel-swoole">https://github.com/swooletw/laravel-swoole</a></li></ul><p>Also, here you can find some more articles talking about this topic:</p><ul><li><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.zend.com/blog/why-you-should-use-asynchronous-php">https://www.zend.com/blog/why-you-should-use-asynchronous-php</a></li><li><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://samsonasik.wordpress.com/2020/04/05/using-swoole-in-mezzio-application-with-sdebug/">https://samsonasik.wordpress.com/2020/04/05/using-swoole-in-mezzio-application-with-sdebug/</a></li></ul>

Considerations when working with async PHP runtimes like swoole

<p>There&#x27;s no doubt that having tests in a project allows you to find potential bugs earlier and more easily.</p><p>Lots of OSS projects require a minimum code coverage in order to accept new pull requests from contributors, and proprietary projects also tend to have some sort of continuous integration workflow which requires certain metrics to be fulfilled in order to get builds passing.</p><p>However, the code coverage can lead to a false sense of security, which makes you think that if certain class has a 100% code coverage, it is also 100% bug-free.</p><p>This is not always true, since you could be calling a method and yet not being properly testing its output or its real behavior. The code coverage will mark it as covered, but you might introduce a bug and still have a green test.</p><p>This is where mutation testing comes in.</p><h3>Mutation testing</h3><p>According to <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_testing">wikipedia</a>, mutation testing involves applying small modifications to a software. These modifications are called mutations.</p><p>Then, if you pass your tests and any of them fails because of this &quot;mutation&quot;, then you have &quot;killed the mutant&quot;. This is what should happen in code which is covered by tests. If tests keep passing after applying this modification, then your tests covering that part of the project are not so good, and you should improve them to <strong>really</strong> test what they are covering.</p><p>So in other words, mutation testing is a quality assurance practice for your tests.</p><p>In PHP projects, there used to be one library which purpose was working with the mutation testing approach, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/humbug/humbug">humbug/humbug</a>. However, it is mostly abandoned now, and it has motivated the appearance of another project, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://infection.github.io/">infection/infection</a>.</p><h3>Infection</h3><p>Infection is a mutation testing framework for PHP.</p><p>It is easy to start using it in your project, since you just need to install it (<code>composer require infection/infection --dev</code>), and create a configuration file. Then, it uses your existing test suite in order to apply mutations to your code and check your tests.</p><p>It currently integrates with <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/sebastianbergmann/phpunit/">phpunit</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/phpspec/phpspec">phpspec</a>, but I suppose there will be compatibility with other testing frameworks in the future.</p><h4>Configuring infection</h4><p>It consumes an <code>infection.json</code> configuration file which could have a structure like this:</p><pre><pre><code class="language-json">{
    &quot;source&quot;: {
        &quot;directories&quot;: [
            &quot;module/*/src&quot;
        ]
    },
    &quot;timeout&quot;: 10,
    &quot;logs&quot;: {
        &quot;text&quot;: &quot;build/infection/infection-log.txt&quot;,
        &quot;summary&quot;: &quot;build/infection/summary-log.txt&quot;,
        &quot;debug&quot;: &quot;build/infection/debug-log.txt&quot;
    },
    &quot;tmpDir&quot;: &quot;build/infection/temp&quot;,
    &quot;phpUnit&quot;: {
        &quot;configDir&quot;: &quot;.&quot;
    }
}
</code></pre></pre><p>This is the configuration of one of my company&#x27;s projects. A modular application where every module is located inside the <code>module</code> directory and has its own <code>src</code> folder with source files.</p><p>This config file basically defines where the sources are located, where infection&#x27;s logs should be placed, a temporary folder which will be used instead of using system&#x27;s default tmp folder, and where is the <code>phpunit.xml[.dist]</code> file.</p><p>That&#x27;s all you need to get infection working.</p><blockquote><p>You can find detailed information of all the configuration options <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://infection.github.io/guide/usage.html#Configuration">here</a></p></blockquote><h4>Running infection</h4><p>Now that we have the configuration file, we just need to run <code>vendor/bin/infection</code>, and it will execute our test suite and then apply mutations to our source files.</p><p>Then it will display the result, telling how many mutants have been killed.</p><p>Infection supports lots of mutators, like replacing <code>++</code> by <code>--</code>, <code>true</code> by <code>false</code>, changing method visibilities, return values, etc. You can find the whole list <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://infection.github.io/guide/mutators.html">here</a>.</p><p>The command line tool supports a list of modifiers, some of which are very interesting. This is how I would recommend you to run it if you want to address the whole project.</p><p><code>vendor/bin/infection --threads=4 --min-msi=70 --only-covered --log-verbosity=2</code>.</p><ul><li><code>--threads</code>: It runs tests and mutators in parallel processes, so you can take advantage of all the cores in your machine. Set a value that makes sense your you. If you have 8 cores, maybe you want to set it with value 8.</li><li><code>--min-msi</code>: This flag makes the process fail if the number of killed mutants is below certain percentage. In this case we require 70% of mutants to be killed. Adapt the value to your needs, and try to gradually improve your tests and increase this value (MSI stands for <em>Mutation Score Indicator</em>).<br/>This flag is really useful in continuous integration environments.</li><li><code>--only-covered</code>: This makes infection address only covered code. We know mutants won&#x27;t be killed in uncovered code, so I think it makes no sense to apply mutators there.<br/>I prefer to separate the <em>required code coverage</em> metric from the <em>required mutation score indicator</em> metric.</li><li><code>--log-verbosity</code>: By default, infection logs all the mutations it has applied to your code. This could lead to a log with thousands of lines if the project is big, so I prefer to set the log verbosity to <strong>2</strong>, which makes it log only non-killed mutants.</li></ul><p>And that&#x27;s mainly it. You can now automate this task in your continuous integration pipeline, or just run it locally, but at least you will discover some parts both in your source files and your tests that can be improved.</p><h3>Troubleshooting</h3><p>While this could be enough for an introduction to infection, the title of this article says something about <strong>big projects</strong>, so I&#x27;m going to explain how we integrated infection in one of my company&#x27;s biggest projects and how we addressed some inherent problems.</p><h4>Already unstable</h4><p>The first problem while working with infection is that, at the moment of writing this article, it&#x27;s not in a stable version yet. That means you could find bugs.</p><p>We found one in which infection wasn&#x27;t properly parsing our phpunit config file and it was excluding almost the whole project from the code coverage report. This caused all mutations to be skipped.</p><p>We reported it and they fixed it very fast, but they haven&#x27;t tagged a version including the fix yet, so we require one specific commit from master while we wait for v0.8 to be released.</p><h4>Time consuming</h4><p>Another problem is that infection consumes a lot of memory and CPU, and takes a lot of time to be run when you have a lot of classes and tests.</p><p>For example, our project has around 1500 unit tests, which take about 1&#x27;5min-2min to be run. Our build process also passes some coding style checks and functional repository tests. It usually takes about 3 minutes.</p><p>The first time we run infection for the whole project, it took more than 16 minutes. That would make a build which is taking 3 minutes to take almost 20 minutes from now on, which is not an option because our build is run a lot of times every day.</p><p>Our solution was making the build run infection only on changed sources, taking advantage of infection&#x27;s <code>--filter</code> flag, which lets you pass a comma-separated list of files and it gets applied only to them.</p><p>The way in which we find which files have changed from previous build is by making a <code>git diff</code> between a commit from previous successful build and the new commit after updating the branch in which the build is being run (the commit identifiers are defined by jenkins&#x27; GIT plugin as environment variables).</p><p>If it is the first time the build is run for this branch, we make the diff with <code>origin/develop</code> instead.</p><p>The result is a bash script like this:</p><pre><pre><code class="language-bash"># Get files which have changed from latest processed commit, including only those inside sources
# If there&#x27;s no previous commit, diff with develop
INFECTION_FILTER=$(git diff ${GIT_PREVIOUS_SUCCESSFUL_COMMIT:-origin/develop} $GIT_COMMIT --name-only | grep /src/ | paste -sd &quot;,&quot; -)

# Check mutations over those files, if any, and require a 70% MSI
if [ -n &quot;$INFECTION_FILTER&quot; ]; then
    vendor/bin/infection --threads=4 --min-msi=70 --only-covered --log-verbosity=2 --filter=&quot;${INFECTION_FILTER}&quot;
else
    echo &quot;No source files affected. Infection skipped.&quot;
fi
</code></pre></pre><p>As you can see, we perform a diff by including only file names, then we exclude those which do not contain &quot;/src/&quot; as part of the name, and then we convert them into a comma-separated list.</p><p>With this approach, the build usually takes 1 extra minute in the worst case scenario, which can be assumed.</p><p>However, I&#x27;m sure the performance of this project will be improved as it grows and gets more stable.</p><h4>Test run duplication</h4><p>While previous approach filters the files where mutations are applied, it is still running all tests beforehand, which makes all tests to be run twice on every build.</p><ul><li>First, our own execution, which generates a code coverage report to be published later, and makes the build fail if tests do not pass.</li><li>Then, infection runs tests again, on its own &quot;conditions&quot; (they take your phpunit config file and generate a new one, which has some custom configuration entries).</li></ul><strike>If it were possible to pass infection an already generated code coverage, we could prevent this duplication, but, as far as I know, it does not support that.</strike> **It does now**.<p>Another solution would be being able to run only tests which affect changed sources, instead of running all tests suites, but phpunit does not allow to filter by a list of files, only a specific file or folder.</p><strike>This is the only problem for which we have not yet found a solution, so If you know any workaround, a comment will be very welcome :-)</strike><p><strong>Update 2018-02-22</strong></p><p>Following what Maks suggested in this <a href="/#comment-3762900802">comment</a>, we have changed the process a little bit, and using a more recent commit from <code>dev-master</code>, we can take advantage of a feature which allows an existing code coverage to be passed to infection.</p><p>Now, our phpunit execution includes these two flags: <code>--coverage-xml=build/coverage-xml --log-junit=build/phpunit.junit.xml</code></p><p>And then, infection is executed with <code>--coverage=build</code>.</p><p>That&#x27;s it, no need to run tests twice anymore :-)</p><h4>Xdebug vs phpdbg</h4><p>Since infection needs access to a code coverage report, you need some tool which is capable of generating it.</p><p>People usually use xdebug, since it is the most extended and feature-rich debugging tool.</p><p>However, there&#x27;s a simpler tool, which is designed to debug php console executions only, and comes bundled with php. It is <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/krakjoe/phpdbg">phpdbg</a>.</p><p>In our project, it usually takes 30%-50% less time to generate a code coverage report than xdebug. The result is not 100% the same, but it is very similar, and it&#x27;s worth it.</p><p>So, instead of running infection like this:</p><pre><pre><code>vendor/bin/infection --threads=4 --min-msi=70 --only-covered --log-verbosity=2 --filter=&quot;${INFECTION_FILTER}&quot;
</code></pre></pre><p>We have to do it like this</p><pre><pre><code>phpdbg -qrr vendor/bin/infection --threads=4 --min-msi=70 --only-covered --log-verbosity=2 --filter=&quot;${INFECTION_FILTER}&quot;
</code></pre></pre><p>It is explained in <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://infection.github.io/guide/usage.html#Running-with-phpdbg">infection&#x27;s docs</a>.</p><p>We have even started to use it to run our own phpunit execution.</p><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>We have seen how to use infection, and how to integrate it in a continuous integration pipeline, even for <strong>big projects</strong>.</p><p>I think it is a very useful tool, and the team behind it is doing a great job. It is also not hard to start using it, since you don&#x27;t really need to write new code, just add a config file and run the CLI tool.</p><p>Finally, I recommend you to read this article, from infection&#x27;s author. It explains how it internally works, and how to use it in a development workflow <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://medium.com/@maks_rafalko/infection-mutation-testing-framework-c9ccf02eefd1">https://medium.com/@maks_rafalko/infection-mutation-testing-framework-c9ccf02eefd1</a>.</p>

Mutation testing with infection in big PHP projects

<p><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://getcomposer.org/">Composer</a> is <strong>The Tool</strong> in any modern PHP project. Nowadays I can&#x27;t imagine to work without it.</p><p>It is much more powerful than some people think, easily solving the integration of third party components in our projects, but there are some advanced features that are less known.</p><p>I&#x27;m going to try to explain some of the best practices and mechanisms bundled with composer.</p><blockquote><p>If you are not familiar with composer, some time ago I wrote an introduction article that you should read before continuing with this one. <a href="/2014/07/19/dependency-management-and-autoloading-in-php-projects-with-composer/">Dependency management and autoloading in php projects with composer</a>.</p></blockquote><h3>Globally installing composer</h3><p>It is a good practice to have composer installed globally, instead of having a binary file per project.</p><p>After downloading the <code>composer.phar</code> file from the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://getcomposer.org/download/">composer</a> website, you can start using it by running <code>php composer.phar [...]</code>. Instead, we are going to place it in a global location so that we can run the command <code>composer [...]</code> from this moment on.</p><p>In UNIX systems, just make the file executable and move it to a folder that&#x27;s already in the path.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-bash">sudo chmod +x composer.phar
sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
</code></pre></pre><p>Under Windows systems, there is an installer that will make the work for you. Download it <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md#installation-windows">here</a>.</p><p>Now, go to any location and run <code>composer</code>. You should see composer&#x27;s help.</p><h3>Create the composer.json file</h3><p>The first thing you should do when starting a new PHP project is to create the composer.json file. It is the main configuration file, where metadata, dependencies and autoloading are defined.</p><p>You probably don&#x27;t remember the main parts of this file, and end up copying the file from othe projects. There is no need to do that, just run <code>composer init</code> and the Composer config generator will be executed, guiding you over the process of creating the file.</p><h3>Add dependencies to an existing composer.json file</h3><p>In the documentation of many libraries, they tell you to manually edit your composer.json file to add new dependencies. That can be problematic, because you could have a syntax error, forget to add a trailing comma, etc.</p><p>The best practice to add dependencies to your composer.json file is to run the command <code>composer require vendor-name/library-name ~3.0</code>. That will add the new dependency to your file (avoiding syntax errors) and then install it.</p><p>If you don&#x27;t include the version name, composer will try to find out what&#x27;s the best version to use, by following <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://semver.org/">Semantic Versioning</a>. If it is not able to know which version to use, it will ask you to decide.</p><h3>Production environments</h3><p>The management of dependencies and new classes is not the same in our development environment and the production environment. In development we need new classes to be automatically autoloaded, and we want to have certain dependencies, like phpunit or php code sniffer that are not of any use in production.</p><p>In development we will usually install or update dependencies by running <code>composer install</code> or <code>composer update</code>. That will include all dependencies in <strong>require</strong> and <strong>require-dev</strong> blocks, and generate an autoloader by following different strategies. Some of those autoloading strategies imply the iteration of directories in order to find class files.</p><p>That is ok for development, but in production we need something more efficient than that, and also, we don&#x27;t want <strong>require-dev</strong> dependencies to be installed.</p><p>To get this done, in a deployment process, we should run this command instead.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-bash">composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader --prefer-dist --no-interaction
</code></pre></pre><p>This is what each flag makes:</p><ul><li><strong><code>--no-dev</code></strong>: prevents dependencies defined in the <strong>requre-dev</strong> block to be installed.</li><li><strong><code>--optimize-autoloader</code></strong>: generates a classmap autoloader, that will map each class with the file that contains it, preventing unnecessary directory iterations.</li><li><strong><code>--prefer-dist</code></strong>: installs distributable versions of the libraries, instead of source code, when possible.</li><li><strong><code>--no-interaction</code></strong>: will always try to make the proper decission in case any &quot;conflict&quot; is produced, so that the process is completly unatended.</li></ul><p>This is the command you should use when deploying a project, just after clonning a clean repository.</p><h3>Private repositories</h3><p>This is probably one of the most powerful features while working on many private projects that depend on each other.</p><p>By default, composer fetches dependencies from a single repository, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://packagist.org/">Packagist</a>, which needs to have access to a public repository (usually github). But what happens if my code is private, and I don&#x27;t want to (or can&#x27;t) open source it? May I use composer to install private dependencies? The answer is yes.</p><p>The composer.json file can include a <strong>repositories</strong> block, where we define other repositories (either public or private) where composer will try to find dependencies.</p><p>There are several repository types supported by composer, from a VCS repository to a plain local directory containing zip files.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-javascript">{
    &quot;repositories&quot;: [
        {
            &quot;type&quot;: &quot;vcs&quot;,
            &quot;url&quot;: &quot;https://my-repos.com/something-private&quot;
        },
        {
            &quot;type&quot;: &quot;pear&quot;,
            &quot;url&quot;: &quot;http://pear2.php.net&quot;
        },
        {
            &quot;type&quot;: &quot;artifact&quot;,
            &quot;url&quot;: &quot;path/to/directory/with/zips/&quot;
        }
    ]
}
</code></pre></pre><p>Composer will look for dependencies on each defined repository in order, and Packagist as a last resource.</p><p>Defining repositories is very flexible and a little bit complex in some cases, so I recommend you to read the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://getcomposer.org/doc/05-repositories.md">documentation</a>.</p><h3>CLI scripts</h3><p>Sometimes a library includes some command line interface scripts that the user can use to automate configuring some stuff.</p><p>If you want to include your own CLI scripts and allow any user to find them when installing your library as a dependency, you will want to define them in the <strong>bin</strong> block.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-javascript">{
    &quot;bin&quot;: [
        &quot;scripts/generate-foo&quot;,
        &quot;scripts/create-bar&quot;,
        &quot;scripts/do-something&quot;
    ]
}
</code></pre></pre><p>It is just a list of script paths that composer will &quot;copy&quot; to the <code>vendor/bin</code> directory after installation (it doesn&#x27;t really copy them, it creates symlinks in UNIX systems and generates bat files under Windows).</p><p>This makes all the CLI scripts of all dependencies to be &quot;placed&quot; in the same location, so it is easier to find them.</p><p>This makes sense only in non-root projects (those that will be installed as dependencies of other projects and are not base applications).</p><h3>Events</h3><p>Composer will trigger some events during the process of installing dependencies, generating autoloaders and such. You can define some scripts or code snippets that will be automatically executed when those events are triggered.</p><p>These event listeners are defined in the <strong>scripts</strong> block. They can be either CLI commands or static class methods.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-javascript">{
    &quot;scripts&quot;: {
        &quot;post-package-install&quot;: &quot;Acelaya\\MyClass::postPkgInstall&quot;,
        &quot;post-install-cmd&quot;: [
            &quot;Acelaya\\MyClass::postInstall&quot;,
            &quot;phpunit -c app/&quot;
        ]
    }
}
</code></pre></pre><p>The complete list of events can be found in composer&#x27;s <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://getcomposer.org/doc/articles/scripts.md#event-names">documentation</a>. Take a look at them and see if you can optimize your workflow.</p><h3>Applications installation</h3><p>At this point we all know that we can use composer to install libraries at project level, but what happens with applications, known as <strong>root projects</strong> in composer&#x27;s terms.</p><p>We can also use composer to distribute complete applications, allowing them to be easily installed by using this command.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-bash">composer create-project vendor-name/app-name
</code></pre></pre><p>This will download the application (as if we would have cloned the repository) and then install its dependencies. We could even take advantage of composer&#x27;s events, and initialize a database or create some non-tracked directories.</p><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>And that&#x27;s pretty much all.</p><p>Use composer, it will improve your PHP projects.</p>

Composer advanced concepts

<p>One of the common problems we have to confront when starting a new PHP project is how to handle the different dependencies we are going to have.</p><p>One could think the easier solution is to download all the libraries we are going to need, put them in a <code>lib</code> directory and add them to the version control of the project, but this could be problematic. Let&#x27;s see why.</p><p>The main problems of using this practice are this.</p><ul><li><strong>Dependencies of dependencies:</strong> Our dependencies may have their own dependencies that we will also need to download.</li><li><strong>Updates:</strong> What happens if we need a new feature in the last version of one dependendency? We are going to have to update it manually, and that can be a hard task. Baybe even the new version has new dependencies of its own that we will need to download.</li><li><strong>Autoloading:</strong> How do we deal with autoloading the classes in the dependencies? Some of them may have its own autoloading system, but anyway, we are going to need to <code>include</code> all the autoloaders of each dependency.</li></ul><p>How do we solve all of this? The answer is <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://getcomposer.org">Composer</a>.</p><h3>Starting with composer</h3><p>Composer has become the dependency manager in the main PHP projects. It uses its own library repository (<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://packagist.org/">packagist</a>) to handle dependencies, but you can setup private repositories too.</p><p>It uses a small configuration file, the <code>composer.json</code>, to know which are our dependencies, and it will download their dependencies recursively without us having to do anything special.</p><p>We can define an autoloading strategy in that file too, and forget about that task for our project and our dependencies.</p><p>This are some examples of famous PHP project&#x27;s <code>composer.json</code> files:</p><ul><li><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/zendframework/zf2/blob/master/composer.json">Zend Framework</a></li><li><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/symfony/symfony/blob/master/composer.json">Symfony</a></li><li><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/doctrine/doctrine2/blob/master/composer.json">Doctrine</a></li><li><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-php/blob/master/composer.json">AWS PHP SDK</a></li><li><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/Seldaek/monolog/blob/master/composer.json">Monolog</a></li><li><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/thephpleague/flysystem/blob/master/composer.json">Flysystem</a></li></ul><p>Now lets see a simpler composer file:</p><pre><pre><code class="language-json">{
    &quot;name&quot; : &quot;acelaya/zf2-acmailer&quot;,
    &quot;description&quot; : &quot;Mail sending module for Zend Framework 2&quot;,
    &quot;type&quot; : &quot;library&quot;,
    &quot;authors&quot; : [
        {
            &quot;name&quot; : &quot;Alejandro Celaya Alastrué&quot;,
            &quot;email&quot; : &quot;alejandro@alejandrocelaya.com&quot;,
            &quot;homepage&quot; : &quot;http://www.alejandrocelaya.com&quot;,
            &quot;role&quot; : &quot;Developer&quot;
        }
    ],
    &quot;keywords&quot; : [
        &quot;mail&quot;,
        &quot;zend&quot;,
        &quot;php&quot;
    ],
    &quot;homepage&quot; : &quot;https://github.com/acelaya/ZF2-AcMailer&quot;,
    &quot;license&quot; : [
        &quot;BSD&quot;
    ],
    &quot;require&quot; : {
        &quot;php&quot; : &quot;&gt;=5.3.0&quot;,
        &quot;zendframework/zendframework&quot;: &quot;&gt;=2.2.2&quot;
    },
    &quot;require-dev&quot;: {
        &quot;phpunit/phpunit&quot;: &quot;&gt;=3.7&quot;,
        &quot;squizlabs/php_codesniffer&quot;: &quot;1.*&quot;,
        &quot;phploc/phploc&quot;: &quot;*&quot;,
        &quot;pdepend/pdepend&quot; : &quot;1.1.0&quot;,
        &quot;phpmd/phpmd&quot; : &quot;1.4.*&quot;,
        &quot;sebastian/phpcpd&quot;: &quot;*&quot;,
        &quot;theseer/phpdox&quot;: &quot;0.6.5&quot;
    },
    &quot;autoload&quot; : {
        &quot;psr-0&quot; : {
            &quot;AcMailer&quot; : &quot;src/&quot;
        },
        &quot;classmap&quot; : [
            &quot;./Module.php&quot;
        ]
    }
}
</code></pre></pre><p>This is the composer file of my Zend Framework 2 module <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/acelaya/ZF2-AcMailer">AcMailer</a>. Let&#x27;s explain it.</p><p>The properties <strong>name</strong>, <strong>description</strong>, <strong>type</strong>, <strong>authors</strong>, <strong>keywords</strong>, <strong>homepage</strong> and <strong>license</strong> are just metadata to provide useful information to other users and ease finding the project in <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://packagist.org/">packagist</a>.</p><p>The <strong>require</strong> property is the place where we define our dependencies and the version we want to install. We can define here the minimum required PHP version and even the php modules we need (like <code>php-pdo</code>, <code>php-intl</code> and such).</p><p>The <strong>require-dev</strong> property allows us to define other dependencies that won&#x27;t be necessery in a production environment, like testing or documentation tools.</p><p>Finally the <strong>autoload</strong> property is where we define how our own classes are loaded. It is very easy to define a <code>psr-0</code> or <code>psr-4</code> autoloading strategy, but we can even define a <code>classmap</code> with a list of paths to files.</p><blockquote><p>You don&#x27;t have to remember the <code>composer.json</code> schema. You can interactively create it by running <code>php composer.phar init</code>.</p></blockquote><h3>Installing dependencies</h3><p>Once this is defined we just need the composer binary file (usually in phar format), that can be found <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://getcomposer.org/download/">here</a>, and run <code>php composer.phar install</code>.</p><p>This will create a <code>vendor</code> folder in the root of our project, download our dependencies there, the dependencies of our dependencies, and set-up an autoloader that will be able to load all our dependencies and our own classes as well.</p><p>After this it&#x27;s enough with a single <code>include</code> statement to <code>vendor/autoload.php</code> to be able to access any class.</p><p>If later in the project we need to update an existing dependency, add new dependencies or change the autoloading, we just need to update the information in the <code>composer.json</code> file and run <code>php composer.phar update</code> to update dependencies and autoloader.</p><blockquote><p>It is recommended to include the composer binary in the PATH to be able to run <code>composer</code> instead of <code>php composer.phar</code>.</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>If you are using a VCS like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://git-scm.com/">git</a> in your project you will probably want to <em>ignore</em> your <code>vendor</code> folder.</p></blockquote><h3>Advanced usages</h3><p>This should be enough to start working with composer, but it is a much more powerful tool with more features. It is not a bad idea to take a quick read to its <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://getcomposer.org/doc/">documentation</a>, but let&#x27;s see the main advanced features.</p><ul><li><strong>Classmap autoloader:</strong> By running <code>composer dumpautoload --optimize</code> we can generate a much faster autoloader which defines a class =&gt; file map array with all the classes handled by composer. This is the more suitable autoloader for production environments.</li><li><strong>Production dependencies:</strong> If we include de modifier <code>--no-dev</code> while installing or updating dependencies, it will ignore (or remove) the <strong>require-dev</strong> dependencies. For example <code>composer update --no-dev</code></li><li><strong>Private repositories:</strong> If you want to install dependencies from repositories other than <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://packagist.org/">packagist</a>, you can do it by using the <strong>repositories</strong> property. It supports many types of repositories, from VCS to PEAR repositories. Complete documentation <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://getcomposer.org/doc/05-repositories.md">here</a>.</li><li><strong>Global packages:</strong> If you want to install dependencies globally, just add the <code>global</code> keyword before the <code>install</code> or <code>update</code>. That will install the dependencies in the <code>~/.composer/vendor</code> directory instead of installing them in the local <code>vendor</code> directory. For example <code>composer global update</code>.</li></ul><p>And that&#x27;s all you need to know to start working with composer.</p><p><strong>Update 2015-04-25</strong>: I&#x27;ve written an article addressing advanced concepts that is a good continuation to this one. <a href="/2015/04/25/composer-advanced-concepts/">Composer advanced concepts</a>.</p>

Dependency management and autoloading in php projects with composer

<p>Dependency management is very important in any kind of project. Any application will need to use third party libraries to avoid to reinvent the wheel.</p><p>The problem is that getting each one of them from a different place takes time, and it&#x27;s not easy to be sure we get the correct version.</p><p>To solve this in java projects we can use an automated dependency manager, like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://maven.apache.org/">Maven</a>, which is really a building system with dependcy management included. The problem with maven is that it could be hard to use, and not very intuitive.</p><p>Instead of Maven, I rather prefer to use <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://ant.apache.org/ivy/">Ivy</a>. It is a more simple and agile dependency management system, designed to be used with <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://ant.apache.org/">Ant</a>, but it takes dependencies from Maven repositories, like <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://mvnrepository.com/">Maven central</a>.</p><h3>Getting started</h3><p>To use Ivy we need to create an <code>ivy.xml</code> file in the project root directory. It will be used to define which dependencies are needed by our project, and will need to be downloaded at building time.</p><p>This is the <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://github.com/acelaya/subclient-subconnector">Subconnector</a> Ivy script.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-xml">&lt;ivy-module version=&quot;2.0&quot;&gt;
    &lt;info organisation=&quot;net.subclient&quot; module=&quot;subconnector&quot; /&gt;

    &lt;dependencies&gt;
        &lt;dependency org=&quot;junit&quot; name=&quot;junit&quot; rev=&quot;4.10&quot; /&gt;
        &lt;dependency org=&quot;com.google.code.gson&quot; name=&quot;gson&quot; rev=&quot;2.2.2&quot; /&gt;
        &lt;dependency org=&quot;log4j&quot; name=&quot;log4j&quot; rev=&quot;1.2.17&quot; /&gt;
        &lt;dependency org=&quot;org.apache.commons&quot; name=&quot;commons-lang3&quot; rev=&quot;3.1&quot;/&gt;
    &lt;/dependencies&gt;
&lt;/ivy-module&gt;
</code></pre></pre><p>As you can see, it is very simple. We just defined an info element with the basic project information, and a dependencies element with nested information of each of the dependencies of the project.</p><p>For each one of them we have to know its organization, name and revision. With this we can be sure we will get the desired library and revision.</p><p>But how do we know what to put in <code>org</code>, <code>name</code> and <code>rev</code> attributes? The <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://mvnrepository.com/">maven central repository</a> webpage will help us with this.</p><p>At the top search bar we can write the name of a library, for example gson. The first result corresponds to the gson artifacts in the maven central. By selecting the desired version we will get the dependency element for an Ivy script, as well as other dependency management systems, like Maven or <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://gradle.org/">Gradle</a>.</p><p><img src="/assets/img/dependency.jpg" alt="Maven dependency example"/></p><p>We just need to copy and paste it. Nice and easy.</p><h3>Automate retrieving dependencies</h3><p>Once our Ivy script is ready, it is time to include retrieving dependencies in our building process. The easiest way to do it is to create an Ant target in our <code>build.xml</code> script, like this.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-xml">&lt;target name=&quot;retrieve-dependencies&quot;
        description=&quot;Retrieve dependencies with Apache IVY&quot;&gt;

    &lt;ivy:retrieve type=&quot;jar&quot; /&gt;

&lt;/target&gt;
</code></pre></pre><p>This will look for the ivy.xml script and download dependencies defined on it in a lib folder, but only binary jar files. If <code>type=&quot;jar&quot;</code> is removed, all docs, sources and binaries will be retrieved.</p><p>Make sure to add Ivy binaries to Ant classpath to make it properly work. The <code>project</code> element in the build script will need also to look like this.</p><pre><pre><code class="language-xml">&lt;project basedir=&quot;.&quot; default=&quot;build&quot; name=&quot;Subconnector&quot; xmlns:ivy=&quot;antlib:org.apache.ivy.ant&quot;&gt;

    ...

&lt;/project&gt;
</code></pre></pre><p>Notice the <code>xmlns:ivy</code> attribute.</p><p>Now we are ready to go.</p><p>For an advanced Ivy configuration take a look at its <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://ant.apache.org/ivy/history/2.3.0/index.html">official documentation</a>. It explains how to use custom repositories, how to set up a proxy server, how to change default local lib folder, etc.</p>

Dependency management in Java projects with Ant and Ivy

<p><a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Main_Page">NSIS</a> is a well known system used to create Windows installers for any type of application based on scripts.</p><p>It is good system. Once we have defined our script we can automatically build it to create application installers in minutes, including creation of Windows register entries, installation folders, application shortcuts, etc</p><p>The problem is that only Windows binaries are officially provided to compile this kind of scripts. This can be a problem in a <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration">continuous integration</a> environment, where continuous integration servers use to be Linux based.</p><p>At this article I am going to explain how to compile NSIS source code in Linux to get it working there and allow it to be invoked from automated tasks run in a continuous integration server.</p><h3>Download NSIS</h3><p>The first step is to download the windows distributable zip file and the source code. Both of them can be downloaded from their Sourceforge project: <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://sourceforge.net/projects/nsis/files/?source=navbar">https://sourceforge.net/projects/nsis/files/?source=navbar</a>.</p><p>At the moment of writing this article the last stable version is NSIS 2.46, so we will need to download nsis-2.46.zip and nsis-2.46-src.tar.bz2. We will put them in a folder were users who are going to need it are allowed to access. I am going to put it at <code>/home/alejandro/nsis</code></p><p>Now that we have downloaded both windwos distributable package and source code we are going to decompress them creating two folders, nsis-2.46 and nsis-2.46-src.</p><h3>System requirements</h3><p>NSIS official documentation says we need this tools to compile it:</p><ul><li>Python, version 1.6 or higher. I am using Python 2.7.3</li><li>Scons version 0.96.93 or higher. This application can be downloaded from their official website <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://www.scons.org/download.php">http://www.scons.org/download.php</a></li><li>A C compiler, in our case <code>gcc</code> and <code>g++</code></li></ul><p>All of this tools can be easily installed from repository, and probably we already have some of them.</p><p>The scons installer downloaded from their website comes in RPM format which could be a problem for systems not based in Ubuntu. For Debian I used the alien [<code>aptitude install alien</code>] tool, which converts RPM packages into DEB packages by running this command: <code>alien -k filename.rpm</code></p><p>Anyway, I uploaded the DEB resultant package for you to <a href="/assets/downloads/scons_2.3.0-1_all.deb_.zip">download</a> it.</p><h3>Compile NSIS</h3><p>Once all the requirements are clear we are going to compile the NSIS binary that is responsible for interpreting the scripts, the so called <code>makensis</code>.</p><p>We have to be at the source code directory, in my case <code>/home/alejandro/nsis/nsis-2.46-src</code>, and we execute this command.</p><pre><pre><code>scons SKIPSTUBS=all SKIPPLUGINS=all SKIPUTILS=all SKIPMISC=all NSIS_CONFIG_CONST_DATA=no PREFIX=/path/where/distributable/was/extracted install-compiler
</code></pre></pre><p>Notice that <em>install-compiler</em> is an argument of the command that is placed at the end, and is not part of the distributable path.</p><p>In my case, using my real path, the resulting command would be this:</p><pre><pre><code>scons SKIPSTUBS=all SKIPPLUGINS=all SKIPUTILS=all SKIPMISC=all NSIS_CONFIG_CONST_DATA=no PREFIX=/home/alejandro/nsis/nsis-2.46 install-compiler
</code></pre></pre><p>The execution of this command will compile the code, generating the <code>makensis</code> binary at the bin directory inside the distributable  package folder, in my case <code>/home/alejandro/nsis/nsis-2.46/bin</code>.</p><h3>Test makensis and create an installer</h3><p>Now that we have makensis created its a good idea to make it available from anywhere, for example adding it to a bin directory, and make sure it can be executed.</p><p>Using the paths from our example, running this commands will make the job.</p><pre><pre><code>chmod +x /home/alejandro/nsis/nsis-2.46/bin/makensis
ln -s /home/alejandro/nsis/nsis-2.46/bin/makensis /usr/local/bin/makensis
</code></pre></pre><p>Now it is time to test the command. Running <code>makensis</code> from anywhere should output something like this.</p><p><img src="/assets/img/nsis.png" alt="Nsis help"/></p><p>If we have an nsis script, runing the command makensis /path/to/script.nsi will compile the script, creating the installer. The syntax is the same used in windows.</p><p><strong>Atention!</strong> While running this command there could be this error.</p><pre><pre><code>Error: opening stub &quot;/home/alejandro/nsis/nsis-2.46/share/nsis/Stubs/zlib
Error initalizing CEXEBuild: error setting default stub
</code></pre></pre><p>This could happen because of a path error, but solving it is very simple, just go to the NSIS distributable folder, <code>/home/alejandro/nsis/nsis-2.46</code> in my case, and create the folder share [<code>mkdir share</code>], go to that folder an create a symbolic link running ln -s <code>/home/alejandro/nsis/nsis-2.46 nsis</code>.</p><p>That should fix the problem.</p><p>With this easy steps we have now a NSIS compilation system under a Linux machine ready to build and deploy Windows installers.</p>

Alejandro Celaya | Blog

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