Phing is a project build system based on Apache ant (See ). You can do anything with Phing that you could do with a traditional build system like Gnu make (See ), and Phing's use of simple XML build files and extensible PHP task classes make it an easy-to-use and highly flexible build framework. Because Phing is based on Ant, parts of this manual are also adapted from the ant manual (see ). We are extremely grateful to the folks in the Ant project for creating (and continuing to create) such an inspiring build system model, and for the open-source licensing that makes it possible for us to learn from each other and build increasingly better tools. Phing was originally a subproject of Binarycloud. Binarycloud is a highly engineered application framework, designed for use in enterprise environments. Binarycloud uses XML extensively for storing metadata about a project (configuration, nodes, widgets, site structure, etc.). Because Binarycloud is built for PHP, performing extensive XML processing and transformations on each page request is an unrealistic proposition. Phing is used to "compile" the XML metadata into PHP arrays that can be processed without overhead by PHP scripts. Of course, XML compilation is only one of many ways that Binarycloud uses the Phing build system. The Phing build system makes it possible for you to: Build multi language pages from one source tree, Centralize metadata (e.g. your data model) in one XML file and generate several files from that XML with different XSLT. It the beginning, Binarycloud used the GNU make system; however, this approach had some drawbacks: The space-before-tab-problem in makefiles, the fact that it is only natively available for Unix systems etc. So, the need for a better build system arose. Apache Ant was a logical choice -- do to its use of XML build files and modular design. The problem was that Ant is written in Java, so you need to install a JVM on your computer to use it. Besides the need for yet another interpreter (i.e. besides PHP), there was also legal/ideological conflict in requiring a commercial JVM (there were problems with Ant on JVMs other than Sun's) for an LGPL'd Binarycloud. So, the development of Phing began. Phing is a build system written in PHP and uses the ideas of Ant. The first release was designed & developed simultaneously, and thus not very sophisticated. This original system was quickly pushed to its limits and the need for a better Phing became a priority. Andreas Aderhold, who was responsible for Phing/r1, designed and wrote much of the Phing/r2 that followed. Phing/r2 became the Phing-1.0 that exists today for PHP4. The current development version of Phing 2.x, requires PHP5 (at least 5.2.x) and makes use of many of the available features in PHP5.2 to achieve a high degree of modularization, code efficiency as well as stability and testability. Phing uses XML buildfiles that contain a description of the things to do. The buildfile is structured into targets that contain the actual commands to perform (e.g. commands to copy a file, delete a directory, perform a DB query, etc.). So, to use Phing, you would first write your buildfile and then you would run phing, specifying the target in your buildfile that you want to execute. % phing -f mybuildfile.xml mytarget By default Phing will look for a buildfile named build.xml (so you don't have to specify the buildfile name unless it is not build.xml) and if no target is specified Phing will try to execute the default target, as specified in the <project> tag. In the same way as traditional make files (but without most of the traditional drawbacks) targets can have dependencies. They can depend on both other targets as well as other files. Phing is under active development and there are many things to be done. The project will also welcome non-coders to help keep the documentation up to date. If you don't already know about DocBook participåating in the documentation is a great opportunity to get experience! To get involved start by doing the following: Read this manual to get a high level understanding of Phing ;-) Read the Phing Wiki to catch up with the latest news Go to http://phing.tigris.org and subscribe to the Phing dev mailing list (this is usually a low volume, high quality mailing list) Report bugs you find in Phing on the Trac wiki and defect reporting system available at http://www.phing.info/trac/ ... and of course, start to actively participate in the development by forking the repository (see below) As of 1 January 2012 all Phing development is based on Git and the project is hosted at GitHub (https://github.com/) In order to participate in the development you will only need to follow three basic steps Register a free account at GitHub Clone the Official Git repository Read up on the (very well written) documentation at GitHub on how to setup your own repository and do things like cloning an existing repository and creating pull requests asking the official Phing maintainers to take in your proposed additions/changes. The chances to have a change set accepted greatly increases if you adhere to the following recommendations Follow the naming and coding principle used by Phing Make sure you have added documentation for your addition(s), including examples. Make sure you have added unit-test code as needed Be polite in all communication! If you have not worked with Git before and are coming from subversion there is a bit of re-adjustment needed. Fortunately there are several SVN-To-Git re-learning guides available (for example http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html which might make the initial transition easier. However, it is probably best to forget about your mental picture on Subversion and realize that Git is a different animal. So trying to think of everything in terms of Subversion is not really helpful in the long run. You should therefore take the time to read the (free!) book "Pro Git", by Scott Chacon available from http://progit.org/.