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Last Reviewed: December 13, 2022

Continuous Integration Solutions on Pantheon

Run automated unit and integration tests with Terminus and Drupal SimpleTest.


Continuous Integration (CI) is a method of running automated unit and integration tests to apply quality control. Pantheon doesn't provide or host tools for continuous integration, but many tools and techniques are compatible with Pantheon. If you have a particular use case or technique that you'd like to highlight, let us know by contacting support.

See our Build Tools guide for a more detailed look at a workflow using build tools like GitHub and CircleCI with Composer for Drupal and WordPress sites.

Terminus Command-Line Interface

Terminus is a Symfony/Console-based command-line interface (CLI) in the Pantheon core API. Most operations available through the Pantheon Dashboard can be performed with Terminus, including:

You can use Terminus for scripting many operations. For example, a post-commit hook can trigger Jenkins to create a Multidev environment with the latest code on master and the content from Live, then run automated browser tests using Selenium.

Autopilot Testing

The best way to test your site on pantheon is using Autopilot.

PHPUnit Testing

PHPUnit is the standard method of testing on Drupal sites.

Integration Bot

We recommend creating a bot user account that will handle the tasks or jobs by an external continuous integration service rather a standard user account.

  • Add the bot to select projects
  • Manage separate SSH Keys for CI

Known Limitations

At this time, Pantheon does not provide or support:

  • Webhooks
  • Git hooks
  • Running Jenkins or other Continuous Integration software on our servers. You'll need to self-host or use a hosted CI solution. Compare solutions here.
  • Shell access
  • PHPUnit Unit Testing PHP Framework: You can still write tests and include them in your code, but you'll need to run them on a CI server, not Pantheon.

Read More

Debug CI pipeline failures

If your continuous integration pipeline is suddenly failing across a large portfolio of sites due to permission denied errors for Git/SSH authentication, we recommend debugging local DNS cache to solve.