<p>Correct me if I'm wrong, but a "build" is a "compile", and not every language compiles. Continuous Integration involves building components to see if they continue to work beyond unit tests, which I might be oversimplifying. But if your project involves a language that does not compile, how do you perform nightly builds or use continuous integration techniques?</p>

[{'answer_id': 53813, 'author': 'fijter', 'author_id': 3215, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/3215', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>Create a daily tag of your current source control trunk?</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 53835, 'author': 'Argelbargel', 'author_id': 2992, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/2992', 'pm_score': 4, 'selected': True, 'text': '<p>Hmm... I\'d define "building" as something like "preparing, packaging and deploying all artifacts of a software system". The compilation to machine code is only one of many steps in the build. Others might be checking out the latest version of the code from scm-system, getting external dependencies, setting configuration values depending on the target the software gets deployed to and running some kind of test suite to ensure you\'ve got a "working/running build" before you actually deploy.</p>\n\n<p>"Building" software can/must be done for any software, independent of your programming langugage. Intepreted languages have the "disadvantage" that syntactic or structural (meaning e.g. calling a method with wrong parameters etc.) errors normally will only be detected at runtime (if you don\'t have a separate step in your build which checks for such errors e.g. with <a href="http://www.icosaedro.it/phplint/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">PHPLint</a>). </p>\n\n<p>Thus (automated) Testcases (like Unit-Tests - see <a href="http://www.phpunit.de/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">PHPUnit</a> or <a href="http://simpletest.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">SimpleTest</a>  - and Frontend-Tests - see <a href="http://selenium.openqa.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Selenium</a>) are all the more important for big PHP projects to ensure the good health of the code.</p>\n\n<p>There\'s a great Build-Tool (like Ant for Java or Rake for Ruby) for PHP too: <a href="http://phing.info/trac/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Phing</a></p>\n\n<p>CI-Systems like <a href="http://code.google.com/p/xinc/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Xinc</a> or <a href="http://hudson-ci.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Hudson</a> are simply used to automagically (like anytime a change is checked into scm) package your code, check it for obvious errors, run your tests (in short: run your build) and report the results back to your development team.</p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/53807', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/572/']