Travis and Composer and virtPHP, oh my!

I recently ran into an issue with one of my repos on GitHub when integrating it with Travis. When I installed dependencies with Composer and ran the PHPUnit tests on my local system running Ubuntu 13.10 and its stock PHP 5.5.3 apt package, they passed. However, I’d configured Travis to also do this under current 5.3 and 5.4 versions as well.

In the first build, everything worked fine under 5.4 and 5.5, but upon getting to the composer install instruction to install project dependencies and PHPUnit, the job for 5.3 failed with some rather unintuitive output from Composer that implied it didn’t recognize the platform package requirement that I’d provided for the minimum PHP version.

Your requirements could not be resolved to an installable set of packages.

Problem 1

- The requested package php could not be found in any version, there may be a typo in the package name.


Side note: While Travis does support Composer, the version of it available by default when running a job is frequently behind the current build. I’ve brought this up with them, but it doesn’t seem they’ve addressed it as of this writing. In any case, it’s easy enough to work around by including a composer self-update instruction as part of the build like so. This ensures that you won’t be affected by any recently fixed bugs in Composer.

Since the cause of my issue wasn’t immediately obvious from Composer’s output, my first thought was that I needed to begin my attempt at troubleshooting the issue by replicating it on my local machine. My second thought was that seemed like an abysmally miserable prospect, as it would require that I have several different versions of PHP installed other than the current one on my system.

I’d heard recently about a new project recently via Twitter called virtPHP that purported to be PHP’s answer to virtualenv for Python or rvm for Ruby. Thinking that my situation seemed a great use case for it, I proceeded to install it.

First, you have to read a bit past the cursor installation instructions on the landing page of virtPHP’s web site, particularly the “Using phpenv and php-build” section of virtPHP’s README file including the portion on package requirements. virtPHP doesn’t accomplish this great feat all on its own. It actually builds on two other existing projects by Christoph Hochstrasser, phpenv and php-build, and functions (in a rather PHP-like vein) more like glue to make working with these projects and managing what they produce easier. More specifically, it provides support for things like differing per-project PHP, PECL, and PEAR configurations.

In reality, all I ended up

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 1754 bytes)

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