#! code

Aside from assigning and using your own properties Phing also comes with a set of built in properties that can be used to find out all sorts of information regarding the system that Phing is run on.

As an example, lets say you wanted to found out the operating system that phing is being run on. In this case you would use the variable host.os, which on a Windows XP system would print out WINNT.

By default, Phing will look for a file in the current working directory called build.xml when you run it. This document tells Phing what it will be doing during the build. You can change this by using the -f or the -buildfile property of phing and giving the build file as the parameter. The following code makes phing look for a build file called wibble.xml.

phing -f wibble.xml

Assuming that the project is called myProject, then a minimal buildfile would be look like the following:

To get Phing you will need to have PEAR installed along with PHP. On a Windows system you can install PEAR by running the go-pear.bat file and running through the prompts there.

To get Phing just run the following commands.

pear channel-discover pear.phing.info
pear install phing/phing

You should see the install output looking like this: