Combining phing and Closure Compiler

I have been relatively late to the exciting world of build automation. This has mainly to do with the sys-admin at my old job who insisted on deploying everything himself. By hand. Which left us developers with the task of writing job descriptions for each deploy. And they would typically consist of a list similar to this:

• Move the packed tar.gz to the server
• Unpack the tar.gz
• Copy the contents to the web root
• Chmod files xyz to 777
• …

Oh the madness. Seeing this it should of course be immediately clear that doing this by hand is extremely error prone and slow and plain stupid. Time to automate!

What can my build-file do for me?

There are plenty of flavours to choose from. After some evaluation I settled on phing since the project I’m currently using this for is PHP based, the build files are easy to read (based on Apache Ant) and it’s extensible. phing comes shipped with plenty of tasks for you to choose from and if there’s ever anything missing you want to get done quick and dirty you can run an Exec Task and have PHP run something on the console for you – neat!

Closure

Phing also comes with a JSMin task but this being 2010 I wanted to use Closure compiler because it’s a much sweeter deal and because I wanted to write this blog post. The files produced are smaller and you can do all kinds of cool things like merging files into one (fewer requests!) or removing dead code. It’s pretty cool. I put the whole thing up on Github so feel free to download it from there and fork me. I’ve included a sample task as well so that should get you up and running pretty quickly.  And did I mention Github?