As I mentioned in an earlier blog post we use Codeship to test some of our private repositories. The folks at Codeship improved their service a lot since we first used it: the UI is improved a lot (both visually as practically) and the list of notification services keeps growing too.

Lately they introduced a cool new feature called ParallelCI. Travis CI has a similar feature called build matrix. You can split up your test suite in multiple parallel builds, called pipelines. If you have a big or slow test suite (probably your Behat tests) you can speed up things a lot by splitting them into multiple pipelines.

Example configuration

Because our phpspec suite is fast enough, we’ve splitted our Behat suite in multiple pipelines. Of course this is project dependant and will vary per use case. To enable ParallelCI open your project settings at Codeship and click on the “Test” link. Scroll down for the “Configure Test Pipelines” section. There will be one pipeline configured called “Test commands” in which all your current test commands are configured.
Click on the green “Add new pipeline” link and a new pipeline tab will be added. Give it a clear name and add your test command. To get an idea of how this can be done take a look at our configuration:

Tab #1: Behat user

Tab #2: Behat profile

Tab #3: phpspec

When you save these settings (the pipeline edit form is bit cumbersome as you will notice when adding new tabs, but I guess this will be improved soon enough) and rerun your last run you’ll see your suite will be split into multiple pipelines and as a result it will speedup things drastically. So I definitely see the use of this new feature and I’m sure you’ll love it for your bigger test suites.