README

A tool that can be used to verify BC breaks between two versions of a PHP library.

Pre-requisites/assumptions

Your project uses git
Your project uses composer.json to define its dependencies
All source paths are covered by an "autoload" section in composer.json
Changes need to be committed to git to be covered. You can implement your own logic to extract sources and dependencies from a project though.

Installation

composer require --dev roave/backward-compatibility-check

Install with Docker

You can also use Docker to run roave-backward-compatibility-check:

docker run --rm -v `pwd`:/app nyholm/roave-bc-check

Usage

Adding to a continuous integration pipeline

The typical intended usage is to just add roave-backward-compatibility-check to your CI build:

vendor/bin/roave-backward-compatibility-check

This will automatically detect the last minor version tagged, and compare the API against the current HEAD. If any BC breaks are found, the tool returns a non-zero status, which on most CI systems will cause the build to fail.

NOTE: detecting the base version only works if you have git tags in the SemVer-compliant x.y.z format, such as 1.2.3.

NOTE: since this tool relies on tags, you need to make sure tags are fetched as part of your CI pipeline. For example in a GitHub action, note the use of fetch-depth: 0:

jobs:
  roave-backwards-compatibility-check:
    name: Roave Backwards Compatibility Check
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - name: "Install PHP"
        uses: shivammathur/setup-php@v2
        with:
          php-version: "8.0"
      - name: "Install dependencies"
        run: "composer install"
      - name: "Check for BC breaks"
        run: "vendor/bin/roave-backward-compatibility-check"

Nyholm Github Action

Tobias Nyholm also offers a simple GitHub action that you can use in your Github pipeline. We recommend this for most cases as it is simple to set up:

.github/workflows/main.yml:

on: [push]
name: Test
jobs:
  roave-backwards-compatibility-check:
    name: Roave Backwards Compatibility Check
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - name: "Check for BC breaks"
        uses: docker://nyholm/roave-bc-check-ga

Running manually

To generate additional documentation for changelogs:

vendor/bin/roave-backward-compatibility-check --format=markdown > results.md

GitHub Actions

When running in GitHub Actions, it is endorsed to use the --format=github-actions output format:

vendor/bin/roave-backward-compatibility-check --format=github-actions

Documentation

If you need further guidance:

vendor/bin/roave-backward-compatibility-check --help

Configuration

There are currently no configuration options available.

roave / backward-compatibility-check

Maintainers

Details