The good people over at Travis CI added HipHopVM support to their build VM’s. Allowing you to test how your code runs in Facebook’s PHP VM. While HHVM might not be ready for prime time usage for all of us, in my opinion it is a good thing to start testing against it and see how it performs.

HHVM testing

Thus making it as easy as adding a new entry in your .travis.yml to start testing against it. To get started add hhvm as version to the php list:

php:
  - 5.4
  - 5.5
  - hhvm

allow_failures

That tells Travis to run a build with HHVM instead of PHP. Now depending on what your package is doing your test will just run fine or crash due to incompatibility between PHP and HHVM. This will break your build. That is why I added it to my allowed failures for now. You can add it to allow_failures by adding this into your .travis.yml:

matrix:
  allow_failures:
    - php: hhvm

Conclusion

HHVM is a very promising project and support for it on Travis allows us to testing it without getting our hands to dirty just yet. We can just sit back and see it evolve by peeking at our test results. How ever there are still a few issues to work out like #1363. The team behind it did an amazing job this far and looking at some commits over the past few days, more goodness is to come.