CircleCI start running steps in parallel after number of steps

Question

I have a config.yaml for my CirleCI workflow.

I use PHPUnit to run my tests but I would like to start running these in parallel using Circle to speed up the deploy process.

So BuildJob looks like this:

jobs:
  #  build-job
  build-job:
    <<: *defaults  
    resource_class: large
    steps:
      - checkout
      - run: sudo apt install -y libsqlite3-dev zlib1g-dev libpng-dev libxml2-dev
      - run: sudo docker-php-ext-install zip
      - run: sudo docker-php-ext-install gd
      - run: sudo docker-php-ext-install soap
      - run: sudo docker-php-ext-install bcmath
      - run: sudo composer self-update
      - restore_cache:
          keys:
            - composer-v1-{{ checksum "composer.lock" }}
            - composer-v1-
      - run: composer install -n --prefer-dist
      - save_cache:
          key: composer-v1-{{ checksum "composer.lock" }}
          paths:
            - vendor
      - restore_cache:
          keys:
            - node-v1-{{ checksum "package.json" }}
            - node-v1-
      - run: 
          name: Create sqlite db
          command: touch database/database.sqlite
      - run: 
          name: Run tests
          command: ./vendor/bin/phpunit -d memory_limit=512M
      - persist_to_workspace:
          root: ~/laravel
          paths: .

So I know I need to add parallelism: 4 into there before the steps to run them in parallel, as documented here but I need the steps up to Run tests in order. Then I will have multiple run tests steps to hit each folder of tests.

Is there anyway to achieve this?

Answer 1

The usual approach of using the CircleCI CLI command circleci tests split to split the tests up for parallel containers does not work with phpunit, according to this discussion (https://discuss.circleci.com/t/how-to-execute-phpunit-tests-in-parallel/25622). However, as @matfax is saying, can you run the tests in several logical groups? Something like

./vendor/bin/phpunit tests/ThisGroup
./vendor/bin/phpunit tests/ThatGroup

If so, you could then run each of those commands in a parallel job within a CircleCI workflow.