Common tools to facilitate the development and testing of WordPress themes and plugins

It is intended that this repo be included in plugin repo via git-submodule in a dev-lib/ directory. (Previously it was recommended to be a git-subtree, but this has changed now that the .travis.yml is now lightweight enough to not require a symlink.)

To add it to your repo, do:

git submodule add https://github.com/xwp/wp-dev-lib.git dev-lib

To update the library with the latest changes:

git submodule update --remote dev-lib
git add dev-lib
git commit -m "Update dev-lib"

Copy the .travis.yml file into the root of your repo:

cp dev-lib/.travis.yml .

Note that the builk of the logic in this config file is now moved to travis.before_script.sh, travis.script.sh, and travis.after_script.sh, so there is minimal chance for the .travis.yml to diverge from upstream.

Edit the .travis.yml to change the target PHP version(s) and WordPress version(s) you need to test for and also whether you need to test on multisite or not:

php:
    - 5.3
    - 5.5

env:
    - WP_VERSION=latest WP_MULTISITE=0
    - WP_VERSION=latest WP_MULTISITE=1
    - WP_VERSION=trunk WP_MULTISITE=0
    - WP_VERSION=trunk WP_MULTISITE=1

Having more variations here is good for open source plugins, which are free for Travis. However, if you are using Travis CI with a private repo you probably want to limit the jobs necessary to complete a build. So if your production environment is running PHP 5.5, is on the latest stable version of WordPress, and is not multisite, then your .travis.yml could just be:

php:
    - 5.5

env:
    - WP_VERSION=4.0 WP_MULTISITE=0

This will greatly speed up the time build time, giving you quicker feedback on your Pull Request status, and prevent your Travis build queue from getting too backlogged.

A barrier of entry for adding Travis CI to an existing project is that may complaining—a lot—about issues in your codebase. To get passing builds you then have a major effort to clean up your codebase to make it conforming to PHP_CodeSniffer, JSHint, and other tools. This is not ideal and can be problematic in projects with a lot of activity since these changes will add lots of conflicts with others' pull requests.

To get around this the barrier of entry for Travis CI, there is now an environment variable defined in travis.before_script.sh: LIMIT_TRAVIS_PR_CHECK_SCOPE. By default its value is files which means that when a pull request is opened and Travis runs its checks on the PR, it will limit the checks only to the files that have been touched in the pull request. Additionally, you can override this in the .ci-env.sh to be LIMIT_TRAVIS_PR_CHECK_SCOPE=patches so that Travis will restrict its scope even more and only fail a build if any issues are reported on the changed lines (patches) in a PR (only PHP_CodeSniffer and JSHint currently are supported for this).

With LIMIT_TRAVIS_PR_CHECK_SCOPE=files and LIMIT_TRAVIS_PR_CHECK_SCOPE=patches available, it is much easier to integrate Travis CI checks on existing projects that may have a lot of unconforming legacy code. You can fix up a codebase incrementally file-by-file or line-by-line in the normal course of fixing bugs and adding new features.

If you want to disable Travis from limiting its scope, you can just add LIMIT_TRAVIS_PR_CHECK_SCOPE=off.

Next, after configuring your .travis.yml, symlink the .jshintrc, .jshintignore, .jscsrc, and (especially optionally) phpcs.ruleset.xml:

ln -s dev-lib/phpunit-plugin.xml phpunit.xml.dist && git add phpunit.xml.dist # (if working with a plugin)
ln -s dev-lib/.jshintrc . && git add .jshintrc
ln -s dev-lib/.jshintignore . && git add .jshintignore
ln -s dev-lib/.jscsrc . && git add .jscsrc

The plugin-tailored phpunit.xml has a filter in place to restrict PHPUnit's code coverage reporting to only look at the plugin's own PHP code, omitting the PHP from WordPress Core and other places that shouldn't be included. The filter greatly speeds up PHPUnit's execution. To get the code coverage report written out to a code-coverage-report directory:

phpunit --coverage-html code-coverage-report/

Then you can open up the index.html in that directory to learn about your plugin's code coverage.

Bootstrap Codeception by:

wget -O /tmp/codecept.phar http://codeception.com/codecept.phar
php /tmp/codecept.phar bootstrap

Then update Acceptance tests configuration to reflect your own environment settings:

vim tests/acceptance.suite.yml

You can generate your first test, saved to tests/acceptance/WelcomeCept.php by:

php /tmp/codecept.phar generate:cept acceptance Welcome

Create an empty .gitter file in the root of your repo and a Gitter chat badge will be added to your project's README.

Symlink to pre-commit from your project's .git/hooks/pre-commit:

cd .git/hooks && ln -s ../../dev-lib/pre-commit . && cd -

You may customize the behavior of the .travis.yml and pre-commit hook by specifying a .ci-env.sh in the root of the repo, for example:

export PHPCS_GITHUB_SRC=xwpco/PHP_CodeSniffer
export PHPCS_GIT_TREE=phpcs-patch
export PHPCS_IGNORE='tests/*,includes/vendor/*' # See also PATH_INCLUDES below
export WPCS_GIT_TREE=develop
export WPCS_STANDARD=WordPress-Extra
export DISALLOW_EXECUTE_BIT=1
export YUI_COMPRESSOR_CHECK=1
export PATH_INCLUDES="docroot/wp-content/plugins/acme-* docroot/wp-content/themes/acme-*"
export LIMIT_TRAVIS_PR_CHECK_SCOPE=patches

The last one here PATH_INCLUDES is especially useful when the dev-lib is used in the context of an entire site, so you can target just the themes and plugins that you're responsible for. For excludes, you can specify a PHPCS_IGNORE var and override the .jshintignore, though it would be better to have a PATH_EXCLUDES as well.

It is better to add these statements to this file instead of to the before_script section of your .travis.yml because the .ci-env.sh is also sourceed by the pre-commit hook.

The library includes a WordPress README parser and converter to Markdown, so you don't have to manually keep your readme.txt on WordPress.org in sync with the readme.md you have on GitHub. The converter will also automatically recognize the presence of projects with Travis CI and include the status image in the markdown. Screenshots and banner images for WordPress.org are also automatically incorporated into the readme.md.

What is also included in this repo is an svn-push to push commits from a GitHub repo to the WordPress.org SVN repo for the plugin. The /assets/ directory in the root of the project will get automatically moved one directory above in the SVN repo (alongside trunk, branches, and tags). To use, include an svn-url file in the root of your repo and let this file contains he full root URL to the WordPress.org repo for plugin (don't include trunk).

The utilities in this project were first developed to facilitate development of XWP's plugins.