Phing is an IT project life cycle management tool inspired by Ant and originally developed by Andreas Aderhold. In particular, it is used to automate recurring tasks during IT project developments, such as the launch of unit testing, code analysis tools and delivery management.
Phing, like Ant, uses an XML file to define a list of actions ("targets"), each containing one or more tasks (file copies, command launches, etc.), that can be executed from the command line. It incorporates a long list of native tasks (execution of PHPUnit tests, code analysis with PHP CodeSniffer, PHP Mess Detector, file handling, work with source code version managers, etc.) that can be extended very easily with custom PHP classes. Distributed through the PEAR package manager, Phing can use ancillary libraries like Xdebug and phpcs for some of its tasks.
Phing is distributed under the LGPL (Lesser Public General License) v3.
Phing is developed in PHP and is compatible with the Windows, Linux and Mac OS X platforms.