I am setting up a CruiseControl.Net server. So far, it only builds a project (.Net website), and I kind-of know how to set up unit testing, code coverage, etc in the future.
What I will need to have soon is this:
The developers commit changes to SVN continually, thus CCNet builds often.
CCNet will publish the latest version to the development server, as soon as a commit is validated (with unit tests etc).
The project manager validates a specific version, in order to publish it to the pre-production server, and create a SVN tag from this revision.
The last point is where my problem lies: how exactly can I set up things so the project manager can, for instance, browse to the CCNet web dashboard, select a previous specific build, and says "this is the build I want to publish" ?
I believe that my thinking is flawed somewhere, but I can't put my finger on it. Maybe CCNet is not the right place to do these manipulations ?
In my mind, I can create a SVN tag using CCNet, and mostly work from the trunk, but maybe I can't ? Maybe it's the other way around, and I should add a CCNet project every time a tag is created under SVN ?
The final goal is that I want to automate the publication process: zip creation (for archiving), web.config modification (using Nant for instance), and website publication (using FTP).
In all these steps, I want to limit the manual intervention to the maximum. If I can avoid to add a new project to CCNet every time a tag or branch is created in SVN, that would be awesome.
Thanks for your help, and sorry if it's not very easy to read, but it's not very clear in my head either...
Since you can create any task, you should be able to achieve the goal, though unfortunately not out-of-the-box.
Since you use SVN, it all depends actually on revision. I think I'd create a separate project for your third scenario and added a parameter where PM would provide revision number. Then based on that I'd tag sources etc. in my own task.
Regarding the other points, I think this is similar. Recently for web projects we started using MSDeploy, and in each stage build the MSDeploy package was created. Then there was a separate build called Deploy, that when forced allows us to select which package we want to deploy using MSDeploy.
Having several environments, however, started a little bit like overkill for managing with CCNet, and I'll be looking into kwakee at some time.
Related
I have been working with TeamCity, Jenkins and Bamboo my last 8years. Latest 2years very involved in ContinuousIntegration factory setup and mainteinance on my team with very good results, giving me a lot of habits about how to deal with builds, artifacts and pipelines.
Now, i'm on a new company, new team, new CI, TFS2015, first time for me.
Just one month before I arrive to this new team they were on TFS2012, with XAMLs, so I took the migration to vNext builds.
At first look, I found on vNext builds the classic build definition, i mean adding steps as a single task to the build, instead of monolithic XAML file.
But with the time, i was trying to create more complex builds, like TeamCity build chains, but this is not possible, strike one...
Then, I was trying to deal with multiple branches, one continuous build for each branch (we are on TFSVC), create packages from each branch, and I found I was duplicating my builds just to change repository paths and a few details, so I moved builds to templates trying to reuse build definitions, introducing variables to generates paths(for repos and branches) and versions and expecting to change only in one place the build and having this changes reflected in all builds derived from templates... but that's was not the case... :
variables are not accepted everywhere, like in repo paths.
can't change templates after created them, just replace them, and builds created from templates are not affected after template is changed.
strike two ?.....
I'm wondering if maybe I'm doing things wrong with TFS, maybe this is a different system and I can't do things like in other CIs.
Any advice in how to approach TFS to have a good, dynamic and reusable set of builds ??
here isn’t the feature that the changes of a build definition or template affects other existing build definitions.
If the build steps of build definitions are the same for each branch, you just need a build definition and add filters for each branch (Triggers > Continuous integrations (CI), after that it will uses corresponding source to build for CI build, for example, develop branch changes > Trigger a build automatically with develop branch source.
On the other hand, you can change branch and source version when queue build manually or through REST API.
If the build steps are different for each branch, you need to modify the definitions independently for detail requirements.
Our company currently uses TFS for source control and build server. Most of our projects are written in C/C++, but we also have some .NET projects and wouldn't want to be limited if we need to use other languages in the future.
We'd like to use Git for our source control and we're trying to understand what would be the best choice for a build server. We have started looking into TeamCity, but there are some issues we're having trouble with which will probably be relevant regardless of our choice of build server:
Build dependencies - We'd like to be able to control the build dependencies for each <project, branch>. For example, have <MyProj, feature_branch> depend on <InfraProj1, feature_branch> and <InfraProj2, master>.
From what we’ve seen, to do that we might need to use Gradle or something similar to build our projects instead of plain MSBuild. Is this correct? Are there simpler ways of achieving this?
Local builds - Obviously we'd like to be able to build projects locally as well. This becomes somewhat of a problem when project dependencies are introduced, as we need a way to reference these resources or copy them locally for the build to succeed. How is this usually solved?
I'd appreciate any input, but a sample setup which covers these issues will also be a great help.
IMHO both issues you mention fall really in the config management category, thus, as you say, unrelated to the build server choice.
A workspace for a project build (doesn't matter if centralized or local) should really contain all necessary resources for the build.
How can you achieve that? Have a project "metadata" git repo with a "content" file containing all your project components and their dependencies (each with its own git/other repo) and their exact versions - effectively tying them together coherently (you may find it useful to store other metadata in this component down the road as well, like component specific SCM info if using a mix of SCMs across the workspace).
A workspace pull wrapper script would first pull this metadata git repo, parse the content file and then pull all the other project components and their dependencies according with the content file info. Any build in such workspace would have all the parts it needs.
When time comes to modify either the code in a project component or the version of one of the dependencies you'll need to also update this content file in the metadata git repo to reflect the update and commit it - this is how your project makes progress coherently, as a whole.
Of course, actually managing dependencies is another matter. Tons of opinions out there, some even conflicting.
In my CruiseControl instances, I have version controlled the ccnet.config file.
When I want to update CruiseControl, I run an "update config" job which fetches the config from version control.
In this manner, the very build process of a release is configuration managed.
I am wondering how to achieve these goals effectively under TeamCity.
I try to keep what ever CI I am using as light as possible and put as much of the running of the build into an msbuild or nant script including running tests, code coverage, etc.
The benefit of this is:
The build file is version controlled.
You can run the script in any environment.
Easier to move between CI environments.
Everyone becomes responsible for the build.
This has been introduced in TeamCity 9. Also answered in another post:
Version control (e.g. in TFS) build configuration for TeamCity - is it possible?
I've been wanting a way to source control TeamCity config for a long time. I ended up writing a Windows Service which monitors the configuration directory and commits changes to git.
The project is on GitHub: https://github.com/grenade/teamcity-config-monitor
You might try looking at the folders that are backed up prior to upgrade (or when restoring team city) as those represent the configurations and changes you've made since initial installation.
http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/TCD4/TeamCity+Data+Backup
Some of the relevant data is actually a database, (and in fact the documentation advises you to point team city to a real database like mysql instead of the default embedded database it uses)
You could try checking those into SVN, but you'll want to stop team city for any check-in actions.
We have a large collection of nAnt scripts that build our various products. They almost all have the following structure:
Erase old working copy.
Check out complete fresh copy from version control.
Increment build number in appropriate file (custom nAnt task).
Run static analysis (StyleCop, Perl scripts)
Build solution using Visual Studio - ends up with MSI output.
Run unit tests (nUnit, JSUnit)
Run static analysis (FxCop)
Zip up deliverables (MSI, readme, etc) into well-named package.
Put this zip package onto a server share.
Email results to team.
From our research, it seems that CruiseControl(.net?)/Hudson/BuildBot would only add the trigger that causes the build, which at the moment is double-clicking the nAnt script over Remote Desktop and a status dashboard.
Are we missing anything else significant?
The question is subjective, and thus so is my answer.
In the projects I've automated before, CruiseControl was used essentially for that one purpose: so we didn't have to remote into the build machine and trigger builds. The CI part is that CruiseControl will monitor the repository for you, triggering builds at the intervals you define.
It also gave us the dashboard from which could trigger releases, or go back to examine logs and artefacts from past builds.
For us that was enough benefit to implement CruiseControl. Perhaps it doesn't "seem" like much until you've finished it and a month later realized you haven't had to touch your build system because it's off silently and thanklessly doing its thing for you.
A Continuous Integration server such as Hudson would do 1, 2, 3, 9 and 10 for you so that you don't have to implement them yourself. If you've already got it working that's maybe not a huge improvement for your current project but it makes things simpler for subsequent projects. It would also, as you mention, take care of when to trigger the build.
Hudson will also chart various trends over time, such as test coverage, build time, static analysis results. You can also have more sophisticated notifications than just e-mail if you choose.
The most important thing it gives you is visual feedback (the bigger the screen is better). When you have one machine, dedicated to displaying buildresults, visible to all team members, it works like a catalyst to people see that something is wrong and fixes it.
If you have something like that standing in a place where your boss can see it and ask you "Hey Wilkinson, why is this screen red?" will you fix your build faster?
Thay all look the same, you can pick whatever you think fits your needs, just have one setup and running.
We're currently using CruiseControl.NET as a continuous integration server for a number of ASP.NET web projects, but we're also evaluating TeamCity.
This is working great for our build server.
What we'd like to setup is a customer facing test server. I'm thinking that when we are happy for our latest development version to be released to the client for test, we could label it in SVN.
I'd then like a second build server to build this version ready for the client to see.
The question is this - is there any way to get either CruiseControl.NET or TeamCity to build only the latest labelled version of the code in a repository?
If anyone has any alternative suggestions, that'd also be greatly appreciated!
You could have a designated location or branch in your subversion repository e.g. \release then point the second TeamCity build server at that.
When your are happy with trunk then overwrite the existing location. The second build server will pick this up, build it, and even deploy it to a test server.
I don't think there's a way to do this directly in TeamCity. You can however configure your build trigger to filter on files and/or users. So, if you touch a given file to indicate release status in addition to or rather than labelling, you can use that.
The trigger filter could be, for example (untested):
+:/ReleaseVersion.cs