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Description
The Ansible content organization documentation only talks about a single project with multiple staging environments.
That is great and all, but I need to manage many projects that will be reusing a lot of the same Ansible roles. Should I build a single roles directory and have all of the project specific playbooks point at a "shared" roles directory. Or should each project have a dedicated roles directory containing only the roles related to the project. Below are some of the pros and cons I have thought of for both:
Shared roles directory
Pros:
All roles are in one single location.
For roles that are shared across multiple projects, the role version upgrade will be applied to all projects that depends on it.
Cons:
For roles that are shared across multiple projects, a role version change will need to be tested in every project, even if it is not the project you are working on.
Dedicated roles directory
Pros:
It is clear what roles are needed to run a specific project.
A role version upgrade can be applied to specific projects that require the upgrade.
Cons:
Common roles are copied/cloned many times. However, using ansible-galaxy with requirements.yml file will handle the managment of roles and role dependencies for us.
Question
Has anyone had success with either of this organization strategies?
You've done already a great job with your analysis, outlining most of the elements to take a decision.
Allow me to add a few more considerations.
In general I the right answer has less to do with ansible and more to do with how you're organizing the development of your scripts and roles. Specially in terms what changes when... the different projects and also the different roles.
In an environment where everything evolves disconnected from everything else, you might want to go ansible-galaxy-like (but with your own local repositories). In this scenario you develop the projects' playbooks independently and they reuse the roles defined in the project's requirements.yml. Changes to the roles can be posted to your private galaxy and versioned so that other projects can decide to upgrade or to keep their current version. Roles can be pulled from one or different repositories, but only those required are pulled for each project using the galaxy commands.
In other extreme, if all the projects in your environment evolve in sync, then a central approach will work better as you will have less moving parts. Everything (all roles and playbooks for the different projects) can be stored in a single repository.
At my previous workplace we implemented different playbooks for each microservice. There were about 30 services in production and another 15 in development. Updating and managing the .yml files was not too much of a problem as yaml files are usually short and easy to read.
I'd say it probably depends on how many services, environments as well as developers you are working with!
Related
I have been writing an E-shop project for a customer and now I have signed a new similar contract with another customer. I was wondering what would be the best practice to continue the first project while staring the second so that the reusability is at maximum?
One way would be to change the first project to read all menu items, slider pictures, ... from the database so that I can deliver the same project to both customers with different databases. The benefit of this approach is that I have to manage only one project, but it leads me to gradually write a CMS, which is a time-consuming task.
The other solution would be to use Git. For example, I would fork the base project into two different projects. If the functionality I am writing is the base one, then I would push it into the base project; otherwise, I push it into the appropriate forked project.
Which one is a better approach in your opinion? Or you guys have any better idea?
Cheers,
Habib
There are a few things that need to be considered.
First of all, This project as you said has the capability to be sold more. So, you must think about how much is possible to make it dynamic via Configuration files, Hooks & Plugins to make the modification to the functionalities of the project through that. I know you have considered this already.
Second, Using a Core Repository and different forks for customization. (It's a great idea but needs proper discipline, workflow and manpower to make sure everything is fine-tuned and works properly )
It's highly recommended to make your application cloud-native and provide proper UAT/QAT Environment for test before launching on the production, And also implementing Test cases to be checked within the Git and CI/CD pipelines in order to prevent issues in the merge process.
I'm not certain about what you want, but if you want to develop an enterprise project that contains many features such as wallet, tracking, payment,... I think you can implement each service as a microservice and integrate all of them.
About git, I think it's better just for handling the source code and you had better use git module for handling microservice and just using branches for developing process
I have finally found some solutions that I would like to share with you guys. Let's divide differences into 2 big categories of data differences and code differences:
Differences in data
If the database in each project is different (e.g., the product has some features in one project and some other features in another project), then the best solution is to use NoSQLs such as MongoDB. In the first place, NoSQLs are designated to support databases that don't have well-defined data structures, and you don't know what features you may add to each entity at present or in the future. It completely applies to my scenario that each shop may have a different data structure. However, since my project is based on Laravel and it does not have built-in support for MongoDB, I have decided to design some key-value tables that haven't been so bad so far.
Differences in the code
Regarding differences in the code, I would definitely suggest branches in Git and other functionalities provided by Git repositories such as Gitlab repository mirroring. Each feature has a different branch in my code, and I can provide each customer with different functionalities by merging those branches I want to deliver to the customer.
All in all, you may take as much business logic as you can into the database since changing it in the future is more straightforward. On the other hand, you'd better keep themes in the code because every customer likes a different theme, and changing them in the code is easier than taking them to the database.
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Are there rules for valid Maven developer roles?
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Closed 7 years ago.
Is there any special significant of using "developers"
tag in pom.xml file or we just use it to list developers of the project.
From Maven doc,
All projects consist of files that were created, at some time, by a person. Like the other systems that surround a project, so to do the people involved with a project have a stake in the project. Developers are presumably members of the project's core development. Note that, although an organization may have many developers (programmers) as members, it is not good form to list them all as developers, but only those who are immediately responsible for the code. A good rule of thumb is, if the person should not be contacted about the project, they need not be listed here.
Refer https://maven.apache.org/pom.html#Developers for more information.
Source : Are there rules for valid Maven developer roles?
This is description by Maven- POM Reference
All projects consist of files that were created, at some time, by a
person. Like the other systems that surround a project, so to do the
people involved with a project have a stake in the project. Developers
are presumably members of the project's core development. Note that,
although an organization may have many developers (programmers) as
members, it is not good form to list them all as developers, but only
those who are immediately responsible for the code. A good rule of
thumb is, if the person should not be contacted about the project,
they need not be listed here.
Answer to your question: Developer tag is use for listing developers in your organisation.
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I work on a project far too big to reside in a single Visual Studio / Eclipse / NetBeans project and we have a "common software" team responsible for developing and maintaining software libraries used by other teams.
I'm struggling with how to manage the development of and changes to the common software. When method signatures and classes change, do I keep the old versions and mark them deprecated? The current plan is to distribute a new build of common libraries every two weeks.
Definitely set up a repository. If you are a Maven-hater check out Gradle, it uses Ivy. Maven has a reputation for being complex but it does have better tool support. IDEs support Maven either out-of-the-box or with plugins, they give you graphs showing what the jars in your project depend on, so you can see conflicts easily.
Either Ivy or Maven will sort out your dependencies so your projects are using the right versions. Each of your projects should list (in the pom.xml for Maven) what version of which of your common libraries that it uses.
A common feature of most version control systems is the use of external branches. Common software is fetched from a shared repository and integrated in each project on update.
A key difficulty lies in documentation changes to the public API of common software and I see two solutions : good communication of deprecated signatures adn continuous integration where finding out deprecated methods can prove painfull.
There are a few options you can have.
Option A: use a repository
For Java based systems I would recommend that you use Ant+Ivy or Maven and create an internal repository with the code in those common projects.
Option B: Classpath Project
If setting up a repository is too much, what you can do is a create an eclipse project called classpath with the following three directories in it
classpath\
docs\
sources\
jars\
The team working on the common project can have a build script which complier the common code and places it into the classpath project, all that the rest of the dev team need to do is checkout the classpath project and reference the files in it during development.
Personally I am a fan of option B unless there is a full time person dedicated to doing builds in which case I go for option A.
The way to manage changes in method signatures is to follow a common version convention so when you do a major version number increase you can say dependent code will have to be changed, and if it is a minor version number increase then dependent code does not need to change. marking code as deprecated is a very practical option because IDE and build systems should issue warnings and allow the coders to switch to newer versions. If the same team is changing the common code and the main project then you will need to have the actual eclipse projects all checked out in the same workspace so that re factoring tools can do their job.
Unless the code in common will be used across across many projects I would keep it in all in one project, you can use multiple source folders to make navigating to various parts of the code easy. If you are having trouble with developers checking in stuff that is breaking things, then I would recommend you have more frequent checkins or have developers work on branches where they merge from the trunk to their work branch frequently to eliminate sync problems, when done they can merge from the branch back to the trunk, the latest version of subversion have decent support for this, and DVCS source control systems like mercurial, and git hub are excellent at this.
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I'm the sole developer working on a couple of webapp sites. I have them in subversion, but I'm not using a project management tool.
I recently got redmine up and going, and I want to set up the projects in there. What I'm looking for is a recommendation as to how to structure these two projects in Redmine. From what I can glean, the structure is Project->subproject . So I'm trying to map this to my to-do list structure. From my to-do list, there are three kinds of tasks: new features, bug fixes, and maintenance ( not quite bug fixes but things that really need cleanup ).
Should I make each webapp a top-level project, with Features, Bugs, and Maintenance as subprojects? What other ways of organizing projects are there? For instance, in the subversion manual, they recommend having project/trunk, project/branches, project/testing, project/releases, etc. Are there similar guidelines for working in Redmine?
As usual, when you configure a system you need to customise it as much as possible to try and meet your own needs. I personally don't know of any guidelines or recommendations for Redmine per-se, however I can relate what we do here and I hope that will help you! :-)
Features/Bugs/Maintenance are just ways to label your tasks so that you can filter them. These are a specific label known as a "tracker" in Redmine. You can define your own trackers for additional types of task.
Project and Sub-Project are also effectively a way of labelling your tasks, but grouping them under a broader umbrella category. When you create 'projects', you assign the trackers you will need to them. In our case, we create an API, and have distinct trackers to identify bugs, features & modifications with (effectively) duplicated tracker names so that we can identify if the tasks are for desktop or dsp programmers. The sub-projects are used to identify product lines or customisations that our customers require specific support for. We also use version labels to identify specific releases in each subproject so that we can get a nice roadmap view of all of the tasks we are tracking. We have multiple projects in our Redmine system, each configured in a similar manner, with some project tasks linked across projects as "related" issues so that we can identify dependencies.
This is just one way to configure Redmine, but is the simplest we could manage given the complex relationships between some of our projects. It is the second configuration that we have tried and we find it works well. FYI, the first configuration was on a test system to allow us to work out what we needed from the system after migrating from Trac, a couple of years ago. The current configuration has been in use for about 2 years and seems to suit our needs nicely.
As I said earlier, you need to decide what you need from the system, but the simplest approach is to think about how you view a project from the top down, configure your system to match your processes, and not change your processes to match the tool - always the more 'disastrous' option IMHO. I wouldn't recommend tracking bugs and features etc in separate projects, as getting your roadmaps together is usually harder, and it also makes it harder to visualise the total task load for a given project. Even dividing task types into subprojects could be problematic, as it complicates things if you find you need to support multiple product release cycles, adding to your workload in terms of managing your Redmine system.
That's about all I can think of for now. I hope that helps you. :-)
The kind of tasks you mention seems to be what Redmine calls tracker. You can define your own trackers. In my opinion, you shouldn't need a sub-project for each "kind of task", but a tracker.
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I'm getting ready to implement a source control system (subversion) but I'm facing some doubts on how to structure my folders.
I use Delphi for all my development and compile the projects from within the IDE.
My current projects folder structure is as follows:
-E:\Work\1. Shared
--Forms (shared forms across all projects)
--Units (shared units/classes across all projects including 3rd party like JCL)
-E:\Work\2. Company Name
--Admin (stuff related with admin work like a license keys generator, Windows CGI to handle order processing automatically, all developed in Delphi)
--Projects
----ProjectA
-----5.x (version 5.x)
------BIN (where all the binaries for this project go)
------Build Manager (where the FinalBuilder project lives)
-------Install (NSIS file that create the setup.exe)
-------Protection (Project files to protect the compiled exe)
-------Update (inf files related with the auto-update)
------Docs (where the readme.txt, license.txt and history.txt that are included in the setup file are)
-------Defects (docs for any testing done by me or others)
-------HTMLHelp (html help for the project)
------R&D (where screenshots, design ideas and other R&D stuff goes to)
------Releases (when building a release with FinalBuilder the setup file created by nsis is placed here)
------Resources (Images and other resources used by this project)
------Source (if a sub-project exists it will compile to BIN since they are all related)
-------SubprojectA
-------SubprojectB
-------SubprojectC
--Sites
--- companywebsite.com (the only one at the moment but if we decide to have individual web sites for products they would all be placed on the Sites folder)
The sign "-" marks directories.
Anyone cares to comment about the current structure or has any suggestions to improve it?
Thanks!
Having setup literally hundreds of projects over the years, and having specialized in software configuration management and release engineering, I would recommend that you first focus on how you want to build/release your project(s).
If you only use an IDE to build (compile and package) your project(s), then you might as well just follow the conventions typical for that IDE, plus any "best practices" you may find.
However, I would strongly recommend that you do not build only with an IDE, or even at all. Instead, create an automated build/release script using one or more of the many wonderful open-source tools available. Since you appear to be targeting Windows, I recommend starting with a look at Ant, Ivy, and the appropriate xUnit (jUnit for Java, nUnit for .NET, etc.) for testing.
Once you start down that path, you will find lots of advice regarding project structure, designing your build scripts, testing, etc. Rather than overwhelm you with detailed advice now, I will simply leave you with that suggestion--you will readily find answers to your question there, as well as find a whole lot more questions worth investigating.
Enjoy!
Based on comments, it seems that some detail is needed.
A particular recommendation that I would make is that you separate your codebase into individual subprojects that each produce a single deliverable. The main application (.EXE) should be one, any supporting binaries would each be separate projects, the installer would be a separate project, etc.
Each project produces a single primary deliverable: an .EXE, a .DLL, a .HLP, etc. That deliverable is "published" to a single, shared, local, output directory.
Make a directory tree where the subprojects are peers (no depth or hierarchy, because it does not help), and do NOT let projects "reach" into each other's subtree--each project should be completely independent, with dependencies ONLY on the primary deliverables of the other subprojects, referenced in the shared output directory.
Do NOT create a hierarchy of build scripts that invoke each other, I did and found that it does not add value but does exponentially increase the maintenance effort. Instead, make a continuous integration script that invokes your stand-alone build script, but first does a clean checkout into a temporary directory.
Do NOT commit any deliverables or dependencies into source control--not your build output, not the libraries that you use, etc. Use Ivy against a Maven-like binary repository that you deploy separate from source control, and publish your own deliverables to it for sharing within your organization.
Oh, and don't use Maven--it is too complicated, obfuscates the build process, and therefore is not cost-effective to customize.
I am moving towards SCons, BuildBot, Ant, Ivy, nAnt, etc. based on my target platform.
I have been composing a whitepaper on this topic, which I see may have an audience.
EDIT: Please see my detailed answer to How do you organize your version control repository?
why the 5.x? (under projectA)
I don't think it is useful to introduce the versions in the tree - that is what subversion, etc is for.