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Closed 10 years ago.
What tools do you use for Automated Builds / Automated Deployments? Why?
What tools do you recommend?
Hudson for automated builds. I chose it because it was the easiest to setup and demo. A system that's too complex and isn't slick-looking won't impress management enough to get them on-board for automated builds. Especially in a project that has a lot of inertia.
NAnt for builds (but MSBuild, Rake, almost anything would be fine) and CruiseControl.NET for deployments. I'm currently working with the new Cruise from ThoughtWorks studios as it provides a better way to stage the various pipelines and let's me deploy any version I want to a target environment.
We use TeamCity, from JetBrains. They also make Resharper And IntelliJ.
We use it for building our .Net applications, and it has been quite easy to set up, connect to TFS, and run additional tools from. It is very polished, and actually kinda reminds me of this site. Found it much nicer than CruiseControl, and for our team size it is free. If you need lots of different builds, more per-user builds, and so on then it costs a bit (but still quite reasonable).
Funnily enough I just spent two weeks overhauling (read implementing from scratch) our nightly build process. Great fun (no, really). I toyed with the idea of installing Team Foundation Server, but we use Perforce for source control and I didn't think it was worth the hassle.
Our process is now a set of Powershell scripts that run on a dedicated build/test server that do the following on a scheduled task:
Wipe out the entire source tree (check that you didn't have anything checked out first!)
Bring down the entire source tree from Perforce (from the last labelled build)
Generate a change report (by syncing to HEAD and watching what comes down)
Build the App
Index the PDB files to the Perforce sources
Store the binaries and symbols in a dedicated symbol server
Run the test projects
Build the installer
Label
Send out emails to the group with status reports on all of the above
Works well.
make and bash on linux
make and cmd on windows
Visual Build Pro
We use a combination of build tools and continuous integration server:
Build tools:
Maven
SBT
Gradle
Rake
Continuous Integration Servers:
Jenkins
Hudson
Travis CI
Automated Build Studio.
Instead of letting you mes with scripts or xml files, it comes with predefined graphical macro operations that allows you to create tasks easily.
For our Windows-compilable stuff, we use FinalBuilder.
CruiseControl for automated builds. Works great.
For automated builds, I think the best tool going right now is JetBrain's Team City. The free version has all the features you'll need for most 5-10 person teams. Set up is easy, configuring new projects is painless (relatively), and most importantly, it's reliable.
For automated migrations, nothing beats PowerShell.
UppercuT uses NAnt to build and it is the insanely easy to use Build Framework.
Automated Builds as easy as (1) solution name, (2) source control path, (3) company name for most projects!
http://code.google.com/p/uppercut/
Some good explanations here: UppercuT
More information
UppercuT is a conventional automated build, which means you set up a config file and then you get a bunch of features for free. Arguably the most powerful feature is the ability to specify environment settings in ONE place and have them applied everywhere, including documentation when it builds the source.
Documentation available: https://github.com/chucknorris/uppercut/wiki
Features :
Simple setup
Simple upgrades
Custom extension points (pre, post, and replace) for each step of the build process http://uppercut.pbworks.com/CustomizeUsingExtensionPoints
Has documentation for integration w/Team City, CruiseControl.NET, and Jenkins (formerly Hudson) https://github.com/chucknorris/uppercut/tree/master/docs
Works on Linux w/Mono
Versioning DLLs based on build number and source control revisions (SVN, TFS, Git, HG)
Compile activities - F5 or Ctrl + Shift + B
Strong naming made as easy as true/false
Code Testing and Analysis
Testing
NUnit
MbUnit v2
Gallio
xUnit
NCover
NDepend
Nitriq
Mono Migration Analyzer
Obfuscation
ILMerge
Environment Templating and Building (ConfigBuilder, DocBuilder, SQLBuilder, DeploymentBuilder) https://github.com/chucknorris/uppercut/blob/master/docs/ConfigBuilder.doc?raw=true
Packaging output to prepare for deployment
Zips up output
At work we use good ol' Ant to build our Java servlets.
We used to use Visual Build from Kinook software, but recently with our new application we switched to MSBuild since it had better integration with TFS and the ability to create custom tasks.
The GNU Autotools definitely. The autoconf and automake are de-facto standard for unix systems.
I've had success using buildbot, triggered by a post-commit script on a subversion repository. This has been used for both automated builds and automated testing.
ANT for both build and deployment/installs.
Makes a great cross-platform installer.
We use Hericus Zed Builds And Bugs Management for our automated builds.
We have 4 branches of code, each with java, c++, C#, cross platform compiles and installers for 5 OS's.
Make for the builds.
Debian packages for deployments (since our production servers runs it).
TeamCity running NAnt scripts for building/packaging and PowerShell for deployment.
I've found that using NAnt, powered by TeamCity, instead of the native TeamCity runners allows us to have a much richer build process (eg. css minimiser, etc). It also means the full build/package process can be run on any developers PC instead of just the TeamCity servers making it much easier to customise and debug problems in the build process.
Related
I'm looking for ideas on how to easily build binaries for common platforms for a Golang project, for release on Github.
I already know how to manually do releases, using Github's instructions at Creating Releases. And I'm currently doing releases using aktau/github-release, but this requires manually logging into different machines (OSX, Linux, Windows) and doing the release.
Benedikt Lang has blogged about using Travis-CI (which I'm yet to experiment with). But I presume the public Travis will only build binaries for Linux.
Any suggestions?
You are most likely right about the Travis CI only building in Linux as go cross-compilation requires you to build from source and build other go executables. Like RoninDev suggested, I would suggest that you setup your own cross-compilation build environment by following the blog post:
http://dave.cheney.net/2012/09/08/an-introduction-to-cross-compilation-with-go
It is quite easy, and only takes about 10 minutes. After you have that, a build tool such as Jenkins will give you the controls to kick off a build for the desired platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux, etc) and then push out git releases for each one.
Thanks for all the suggestions and answers that were given. Cross-compilation was what I was looking for, and Dave Cheney's blog post was a good start.
However I found a better solution - laher/goxc - "a build tool for Go, with a focus on cross-compiling, packaging and deployment". It was inspired by Dave Cheney's work, and also includes deploy tools for Github - just what I was looking for. (For example, I used it to release soniah/awsenv)
I created goreleaser to do just that.
You can try it out if you want :)
I have spent a couple of days going through a lot of sites and reading about Nant , Rake etc.
please forgive my Noob question but I still cannot find what is the difference between Nant and CruiseControl.
As far as I can see Nant can do automated builds , run tests .
so what extra does cruisecontrol do ?
Also there was mention of Teamcity . there too from the documents I can see it can do builds but it also can use Nant but I fail to understand why it needs to use Nant when it can do the builds itself
I am basically trying to follow proper software practices by introducing automated builds at my workplace
Appreciate all help
Nant by itself can do builds and test, but it needs to be launched by some other mechanism such as a windows scheduled job. There is not a capability of launching the build only when source code changes, at least without
an amount of additional scripting.
Nant itself is just a script runner, not a scheduler - it requires some other software (or a manual user action) to launch it.
Continuous integration (CI) tools such as CruiseControl or TeamCity provide monitoring of source control to launch a build process in addition to other things. The build itself could the be a single nant script which runs the build and tests as you suggest, or the build could be done using a series of tasks which are built in to the CI server. The difference is not how the builds are done, but how they are initiated and reported.
CI servers additionally usually provide web-based reporting of the details of the build runs and unit tests.
In summary, Ci tools provide monitoring, scheduling, and reportingin addition to scripting of the build process.
Nant is a scripting language
CruiseControl is a free continuse integration tools
Teamcity in another contiuse integration tools,
regards,
I'm currently looking to start setting up nightly builds with TFS and our company has never done this before. I'm looking for some pointers on maybe where to get started, what I should look out for as well as structure of solutions.
Background
Current TFS source location has 2 web projects, 5-10 windows services, 10-15 supporting dlls. These will continue to grow.
Currently there are solution files for each web project and each windows service. Each of these solutions contain the supporting projects (internal dlls) and also the correlating unit testing projects.
All of our external dependencies (log4net, nhibernate etc) are managed by NuGet and are in a folder within TFS called packages
Some of my questions include but are not limited to
Should I have a master solution file that contains all of these projects? Maybe this is easier when setting up nightly builds?
I'd also like to run the unit and integration tests as part of the nightly builds. Is this just additional configuration on the build server?
What tools are involved when setting up nightly builds with TFS?
I'm not necessarily looking for complete answers but it would be great if someone could point me to some good resources (books, websites, blogs)? Like I said I'm really green as far as nightly builds are concerned and I just want to make sure I start off on the right foot. Hopefully I can learn from others mistakes.
Here are some simple "answers" to your 3 questions (though I agree with the comments above that this isn't the most answer-able SO question):
An good read on creating reliable builds in MSBuild : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd483291.aspx
Yes running tests is just an option in a TFS Build Definition, you can configure a few options in addition to "on/off" : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms253138.aspx
You can also use TFS Lab management and test agents to execute tests in a different manner: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lab_management/archive/2009/05/18/vsts-2010-lab-management-basic-concepts.aspx
Configuring TFS builds : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd647547.aspx
I have a very large, mostly HTML/SSI site that I manage part-time and do weekly deployments on in addition do being an enterprise Magento developer. The site in question has ~5000 static HTML files and requires a lot of upkeep to manage deployments.
In addition to that site, I manage numerous Magento installs. I currently manage them from SVN and do exports/checkouts from various production and qa branches/tags.
While this is manageable, I don't get some of the things that I know build tools provide. Some of those features would be:
Automatic Minification of CSS/JS
Revision History
Multi-server deployment
Runtime configuration
Stats of broken builds/build time/deployment frequency
Integration with Testing frameworks
The three tools I've been reviewing are
Apache Ant
phpUnderControl
Capistrano (at the insistence of a friend of mine who is a RoR dev)
I briefly looked at Hudson, and had a ton of problems trying to get it up and running.
My Questions:
What is the upside/downside of going to this type of strategy?
Any hidden pitfalls that you've experienced?
Which tool do you think would best fit for the deployment/management of the HTML site?
Does anyone have experience with deploying distributed Magento from a deployment/build management system?
Thanks in advance...
Update
Still no movement here, so I'm going to ask this:
Should I rather rebuild in HTML5 Boilerplate which has Ant build scripts out of the box? This would afford me the ability to use Ant, but the build scripts are already pre-made so I have a good starting point. Your thoughts and suggestions are welcome.
I've got one more tool for you to review: Jenkins (earlyer: Hudson).
Its a great tool to run and control your builds. Furthermore you can remote the console and get notifications via Jabber protocol.
With VisualStudio Publish, CruiseControl.NET, MSBuild, aspnet_compiler.exe, and Web Deployment Projects out there, how would one know which tool to use to ultimately get a .NET 2.0 web application into a testing/production environment?
With .NET 1.1, I simply copied all files over to the server's directory and set it to a configured virtual directory in IIS. Unless I am really missing something, it seemed to work just fine. Now I'm reading about how important it is to put some good thought into 2.0 deployment and the the more I read, the more I get confused.
Please breakdown how to choose which tool to use, and why you would use that tool. If more than one tool is needed, please identify how they relate to this process.
CC.NET is for Continuous Integration it can build your setup projects as artifacts, but that is not it's main purpose. MSBuild is the Microsoft build system -- again, not related to deployment. aspnet_complier compiles your web sties, which may make deployment easier, but is not in itself deployment.
Web deployment projects is what you should be looking at. Here's a decent little post that goes over some of the options for deployment and a reference from MSDN. There are also commercial products.
In most cases, you can right-click on project in VS.NET and choose "Publish". This will give you a few options for deploying via FTP or file path.
Publish Web http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/1261/screencfl.png
What we do it publish to an SVN repository, then run SVN UPDATE on the machines it needs to go to...
I use TeamCity, which implements
Rebuilding solution with
devenv.exe in command line
Changing settings in web.config
(connection strings and debug mode)
with sed.exe
Precompiling WebSite
with the aspnet_compiler in command
line.
Copying solution to FTP
(with internal tool)