Freek Van der Herten's blog on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript

Posts tagged with ci

Running PHP tests in parallel on GitHub actions

Apr 22nd 2025 by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

A couple of years ago, Laravel introduced a great feature which allows to run PHPUnit / Pest tests in parallel. This results in a big boost in performance.

By default, it determines the concurrency level by taking a look at the number of CPU cores your machine has. So, if you're using a modern Mac that has 10 CPU cores, it will run 10 tests at the same time, greatly cutting down on the time your testsuite needs to run completely.

A default runner on GitHub doesn't have that many cores, so you can't leverage parallel testing as good as in your typical local environments.

In this blog post, I'd like to show you a way of running your tests on GitHub, by splitting them up in small chunks that can run concurrently.

We use this technique at Oh Dear to cut down the running time of our vast testsuite from 16 minutes to only just 4. In this blog post all examples will come from the Oh Dear code base.

Build and Cache Frontend Assets once using GitHub Actions

Aug 7th 2024 – stefanzweifel.dev

Learn how to use GitHub Actions to speed up your Deployer deployments by cleverly caching your frontend build assets

Rethinking deploys at Flare

May 8th 2024 – flareapp.io - submitted by Spatie

We now use GitHub actions to deploy our application

How to use GitHub Actions build matrix to deploy artifacts to multiple servers

Mar 13th 2024 – philo.dev

Philo explains in great detail how to achieve this

My Reusable GitHub Actions Workflows

Mar 12th 2024 – stefanzweifel.dev

Stefan's backup workflow is very interesting.

A Lot Less Node with Airdrop

Jul 20th 2022 – chipperci.com

Airdrop determines when you can skip building static assets, saving a LOT of time and server resources in continuous integration and deployment.

Running PHPUnit tests in parallel using GitHub actions

Mar 5th 2022 – rias.be

One of our projects has a really large test suite that isn't optimised to run with Laravel's parallel testing. It was starting to take more than 15 minutes to have the whole test suite run inside Github Actions, which is when my colleague Rias searched for a better way to do this.

Saying Goodbye To Typo CI

Jun 25th 2021 – mikerogers.io

There's no shame in stopping a project if it turns out it isn't worthwhile to continue working on it.

Auto Merge Dependabot Pull Requests

Apr 29th 2021 – stefanzweifel.io

Stefan Zweifel created a nice workflow to automatically merge dependabot PRs when all tests pass

How to create an empty commit

Jan 4th 2021

If you're ever required to test CI, and the only way to trigger it is to create a new commit, then you can use --allow-empty flag of `git commit` to create an empty commit without introducing new changes.

h/t: https://t.co/EKSeXgTbk3 #denoland #git pic.twitter.com/p6lhPPYlNK
— Satya Rohith (@SatyaRohith_) January 3, 2021

Moving PHP and Laravel tests from Travis CI to GitHub Actions

Dec 8th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Earlier this year, Travis CI announced a new pricing model that effectively ends the generous open-source offering they had for many years. It seems that, even though there were some plans to provide free resources for OSS projects in the future, all activity for OSS projects has stopped.

At our company, we create a lot of open-source projects and packages. Beginning 2020, we already moved most of our stuff to GitHub actions.

Sure, you can read the GitHub actions docs to start learning the possibilities, but in my experience, it might be better to see some examples of practical uses cases. Here are some interesting links that might help you get started with GitHub actions.

Laravel Worldwide Meetup #4: GitHub Actions & Unconventional Autoloaders

Oct 28th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Here's the recording of Laravel Worldwide Meetup #4. Ryan Chandler showed a cool GitHub Action workflow to test a Laravel app. Next, Liam Hammet demonstrated some unconvential things you can do with PHP autoloaders.

Running GitHub Actions for Certain Commit Messages

Sep 30th 2020 – ryangjchandler.co.uk - submitted by Ryan Chandler

A quick look at how you can configure your GitHub Actions workflows to only run when a certain phrase is present in the commit message.

Supporting and testing using multiple Laravel and PHP versions

Sep 9th 2020 – spatie.be

In this video you'll learn how add support for multiple PHP and Laravel versions, and how to run the tests against all combinations of Laravel and PHP.

How to use a MySQL database on GitHub Actions

Mar 4th 2020 by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Recently we started using GitHub Actions to test all our packages. You can read more about our general setup in this blog post.

For most of the packages, this works great. However, some of our packages, such as Laravel Tags, use JSON functions that are not available in SQLite. Luckily it's straightforward to use a database like MySQL in GitHub Actions.

You can write workflows in YAML, which makes them easy to write and read. In the beta version of GitHub Actions you had to use Ocaml, which was quite hard to comprehend, and there was almost no documentation. If you were a bit frightened by the beta version, like me, then rest assured: the YAML version is easier to use, and the documentation is well written.

Testing your Laravel app using GitHub actions

Oct 7th 2019 – ma.ttias.be

Mattias Geniar explains how you can use GitHub actions to run the testsuite of your Laravel app.

Last year we wrote a blogpost about our setup we use for Oh Dear! with Gitlab, and how we use their pipelines for running our CI tests. Since then, we've moved back to Github since they introduced their free private repositories. In this post I'll describe how we re-configured our CI environment using Github Actions.

Run prettier or php-cs-fixer with GitHub Actions

Sep 23rd 2019 – stefanzweifel.io

Stefan Zweifel shared his GitHub action that can automatically fix code style issues using prettier and php-cs-fixer

One workflow is really like, is to run prettier and php-cs-fixer to automatically format my code and commit the fixed files back to the repository.

Freek.dev