I work on a project that uses Travis CI to test and build against three jobs. (PHP 7.0, 7.1, 7.2) I recently ran into a roadblock where Travis would fail with “No output has been received” on the job that did code coverage using Xdebug. A screenshot of the last successful build before the failure:

Only one of our three jobs runs code coverage because it’s ridiculously slow. We were disabling coverage on the other jobs so that, in a worse case scenario, we could at least check a hotfix in under 5 minutes.

This system was working fine until a few days ago. The test suite has kept growing and we got to the point where Travis just wouldn’t run code coverage anymore.

We tried every trick in the book and the best I could get it down to, minus the other stuff required to build (git clone, install dependencies, yarn build, phpcs, …) was 42 minutes.

Enter Phpdbg

Down from 42 minutes to 4!

Source:

https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/speeding-up-the-build/#php-optimizations

Caveats:

Travis CI docs say to do phpenv config-rm xdebug.ini but this crashes the build on environments where Xdebug is not installed. Fixed by conditionally checking if Xdebug is on:

before_script: - if php -v | grep -q 'Xdebug'; then phpenv config-rm xdebug.ini; fi

phpdbg didn’t work in PHP 7.2: /home/travis/.travis/job_stages: line 57: 8492 Segmentation fault (core dumped). Fixed by running phpdbg only on PHP 7.1:

script: - if [[ ${TRAVIS_PHP_VERSION:0:3} == "7.1" ]]; then phpdbg -qrr -d memory_limit=-1 vendor/bin/phpunit --configuration phpunit.xml --coverage-clover coverage.xml; fi - if [[ ${TRAVIS_PHP_VERSION:0:3} != "7.1" ]]; then vendor/bin/phpunit --configuration phpunit.xml; fi

A test that uses exec didn’t work: Unable to fork […] Fixed by only running that test when phpdbg is disabled. As we have three jobs (PHP 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2) and two of them don’t run code coverage (PHP 7.0 and 7.2) the test itself still runs, we just lose a bit of code coverage when running against PHP 7.1:

$runtime = new \SebastianBergmann\Environment\ Runtime (); if ( ! $runtime->isPHPDBG() ) { // // TODO: exec(): Unable to fork error when running phpdbg() }

“The output is not the same…” Fixed by not giving a shit? Is there really 42 minutes of justifiable output difference between Xdebug and Phpdbg? Our codecov metrics remained the same. Our Travis build stopped failing.

I <? PHP