CMake and Continuous Integration with several dependent projects - continuous-integration

I currently configure CMake/CTest for CI. Everything works fine except for the following:
We have several projects which depend on each other. In our toplevel build script, though, they are just being built in the right order. During CI, for each of the projects I just do a "make Continuous" in the build directory of the respective project. However when, say a header file is updated in one project only this project gets build after "make Continuous". Another dependent project which uses the same include files is not rebuild during "make Continuous" because in this project no updates occur.
So my question: Is there any way to force the build step to be done during "make Continuous", independent of the result of the svn update?
Any other ideas how to solve this?

add_dependencies will work for your case.
add_dependencies(target-name depend-target1 depend-target2 ...)
See also
http://cmake.org/cmake/help/v2.8.10/cmake.html#command:add_dependencies

Related

Why does TFS build is not running tests as if it don't exist?

I have recently added a TFS build to our project, and configured it to run the automated tests that are in the project, and for some reason the build is ignoring the tests as if they don't exist!
In order to figure this out I created another solution with only a basic project from the origin code and the test project as well.
I've added these to the TFS and configured an almost equal build to this solution, and guess what? it executed the tests! it's the same tests as the original. just a copy of it.
The main difference between these 2 solutions is that the original code is a big solution with many projects, most of the projects are in some kind of a solution directory (and so does the tests project - it's inside a solution directory as well).
The difference between the TFS build definition is only that the output location of the build is set to single directory (I also tried PerProject and it worked) and in the original code it's defined to "AsConfigured" because we have some build tasks for copying dlls and such.
Has anyone encountered this problem?
Any ideas?
Thanks
TFS will look for the test DLLs in the BINARIES output folder location. You need to configure your 'build tasks for copying DLLs' to ensure your test DLLs are copied to this location.
Test assembly file specification
Specify the binary files that contain the tests that you want to run. Leave the default value (**\**test*.dll) if you want the build agent to search recursively for any .dll files that match *test*.dll in the binaries subdirectory of the build agent's working directory.
TFS2013 — http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms253138.aspx
TFS2012 — http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms253138(v=vs.110).aspx

TeamCity Dependency not sticking around

I'm sure this is a dumb mistake on my part but I can't find the right answer.
I have a project that has a snapshot dependency on another project. For sake of discussion website is dependent on toolkit.
Monitoring the build folder:
c:\programs\Teamcity\buildagent\work
I see the toolkit get built and the folders all exist as expected:
c:\programs\teamcity\buildagent\work\toolkit
Then the website build kicks off and the folder above gets deleted before the website build starts.
This results in the website saying the reference couldn't be found. What setting am I missing?
Using TeamCity 7.1.2, working on getting it upgraded to 8.1 but it requires some internal evaluation first.
Don't think its a version issue. How do both of your builds know where to put the artefacts at . For ex teamcity normally builds stuff at c:\programs\teamcity\buildagent\work****\toolkit , not at c:\programs\teamcity\buildagent\work\toolkit ?
Also, if your targets are dependent upon each other across builds, (1) have you setup any artefact dependencies or (2) any process that does not read of a shared agent workspace ? or (3) forcing both builds to run from the same directory
See if both your builds are running on the same target "folder name". In case they are , deselect any option that "cleans up build targets" before they run.
Also, you might want to check your build files to see if they have any code to clean directories before they start to run

How to create Target that always runs at the end of a build

I've got a vxcproj with configuration type Driver and am trying to edit the project file to add a custom target that will always run at the end of building the project. I want it to run even if the standard build system detects it doesn't need to build anything.
I'm having a hard time trying to work out where to attach my target. If I attach to AfterBuild or PostBuildEvent, my target won't run if there's nothing to build.
If you're interested, I need this target to run run StampInf and Inf2Cat tasks as the built in versions of those don't suit my purposes. The built in ones always run and dirty outputs, causing knock on rebuilding which I don't want in an incremental build.
Add a project of type General + Makefile. VS cannot optimize the build for these type of projects, the custom Build Command Line setting you specify always runs. You'll typically need to set the project dependencies to ensure it runs last.

Continuum finding dependencies and building on chain-dependent projects

I am the Configuration manager for an IT firm. Currently we are using anthill build management server for all our build related purposes. We are looking to implement Continuous Integration in our development life cycle.
Currently the building process is done manually. Suppose there are 5 projects A,B,C,D,E and E is the parent project and the dependency chain does like this:
A->B->C->D->E
What we do is we build A first update project.xml of B to the latest version of A, build B so on and so forth untill all dependent projects get built and finally parent project gets built.
What I am thinking is automating the entire process i.e. automatically finding out dependencies and building them first and then updating the version of parent projects and building them again to a newer version.
Would continuum do this for me? If not is here any other CI tool that does this?
Hudson does this really well, if you're using Maven, it'll even automatically figure out the build dependencies for you automatically after the first build, otherwise you can manually define the build dependencies. I.e., it lets you configure the system to build project B after a successful project A build.
I'm not sure if it matters to you, but Hudson is also open source.
If not is here any other CI tool that does this?
I like TeamCity, which does pretty much everything you'll need. With the latest version (and a plugin from JetBrains), there's even Git support.
On the other hand, any continuous integration system should handle dependencies easily.
We use Zed Builds and Bugs for a setup similar to this. We have a master project that has sub-project dependencies and the build system handles everything in the proper order.
We also have very small, tight builds for the sub-projects so that each of them can be built when the developers commit to source control. The Zed Server is capable of pulling the latest artifacts from these small builds and putting them together into larger builds, but we haven't yet used that feature.
Our check-ins trigger the small CI builds, and then twice per day the entire application is re-built from scratch, following the dependency chain.
I'd agree with OregonGhost, though, any CI system should be able to set up this type of chain.
I don't think you need a CI tool for this. Try to automate this using a buildscript and use Continuum (or any other CI tool) to trigger your preferred buildtool.

Pre-build task - deleting the working copy in CruiseControl.NET

I'm currently in the process of setting up a continuous integration environment at work. We are using VisualSVN Server and CrusieControl.NET. Occasionally a build will fail and a symptom is that there are conflicts in the CruiseControl.NET working copy. I believe this is due to the way I've setup the Visual Studio solutions. Hopefully the more projects we run in this environment the better our understanding of how to set them up will be so I'm not questioning why the conflicts happen at this stage. To fix the builds I delete the working copy and force a new build - this works every time (currently). So my questions are: is deleting the working copy a valid part of a continuous integration build process, and how do I go about it?
I've tried solutions including MSTask and calling delete from the command line but I'm not having any luck.
Sorry for being so wordy - good job this is a beta :)
Doing a full delete before or after your build is good practice. This means that there is no chance of your build environment picking up an out of date file. Your building exactly against what is in the repository.
Deleting the working copy is possible as I have done it with Nant.
In Nant I would have a clean script in its own folder outwith the one I want to delete and would then invoke it from CC.net.
I assume this should also be possible with a batch file. Take a look at the rmdir command http://www.computerhope.com/rmdirhlp.htm
#pauldoo
I prefer my CI server to do a full delete as I don't want any surprise when I go to do a release build, which should always be done from a clean state. But it should be able to handle both, no reason why not
#jamie: There is one reason why you may not be able to do a clean build every time when using a continuous integration server -- build time. On some projects I've worked on, clean builds take 80+ minutes (an embedded project consisting of thousands of C++ files to checkout and then compile against multiple targets). In this case, you have to weigh the benefit of fast feedback against the likelihood that a clean build will catch something that an incremental build won't. In our case, we worked on improving and parallelizing the build process while at the same time allowing incremental builds on our CI machine. We did have a few problems because we weren't doing clean builds, but by doing a clean build nightly or weekly you could remove the risk without losing the fast feedback of your CI machine.
If you check out CC.NET's jira there is a patch checked in to implement CleanCopy for Subversion which does exactly what you want and just set CleanCopy equal to true inside your source control block just like with the TFS one.
It is very common and generally a good practice for any build process to do a 'clean' before doing any significant build. This prevents any 'artifacts' from previous builds to taint the output.
A clean is essentially what you are doing by deleting the working copy.
#Brad Barker
Clean means to just wipe out build products.
Deleting the working copy deletes everything else too (source and project files etc).
In general it's nice if you're build machine can operate without doing a full delete, as this replicates what a normal developer does. Any conflicts it finds during update are an early warning to what your developers can expect.
#jamie
For formal releases yes it's better to do a completely clean checkout. So I guess it depends on the purpose of the build.

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