I have to set up a project which has multiple active branches in Jenkins .The source repository is SVN .What is the best Stratergy for building different branches in Jenkins with SVN ,should i create a job for every branch or is there some way to build every branch in one job.
Yes, creating a job for every branch seems to be the way people do it for now, see e.g. http://zeroturnaround.com/rebellabs/continuous-integration-and-feature-branches/#!/ and the links under material used.
It seems a common thing to do is to have some sort of script create the jobs for you either using the api or modifiyng directly in the config.xml's on the filesystem.
Related
I have a single Cloud Source Repository with multiple projects. I am able to create a cloudbuild.yaml file in the repo root that builds all projects. However, I don't want to have a build trigger that rebuilds all of the projects since most commits will be for a single project. Ideally I would like to have a cloudbuild.yaml file in each project subdirectory and a build trigger that detects changes in the project subdirectory of the repository. Is something like this possible?
As a possible workaround, I believe I may be able to keep my cloudbuild.yaml in the repository root and create a custom step that will get the commit sha (via the COMMIT_SHA substitution) and then get the list of files committed (via "git show --name-only --pretty=format: $COMMIT_SHA") to determine which project should be built and what image should be created. An alternative may be to have a tagging naming convention that will contain the project name and basing the trigger on that but I don't want to tag each commit.
Note, it seems like build triggers work very well when you have multiple repos but we made the decision to go with a mono repo and I don't want to rehash that debate in this question. I'd like to understand how to best use the Build Triggers in a mono repo.
I am starting to prepare a roadmap for our release process. We are at present using tortoise svn and ant for building source. I am considering implementing continuous integration and would like to know right direction for the choices below:
Firstly, the present process is such that a developer would work on a file, commits that file directly to repo. Others would run the tortoise update command to pull in the required changes. The same process is followed on the build server where in would update the source code, build and then deploy to qa and production servers. However, this process lacks control of repo since during an update, unwanted code is also pulled in case two developers worked on the same file fixing two different issues. One approved by qa and other rejected. How can i overcome this scenario.
Secondly, apart from source we have a bunch of other files such as xml files, css,js etc . How do i automate deployment of these files? I have configured cruisecontrol on my local machine and it works fine when it comes to executing a build but now sure how to handle other files since updating those files in production seems risky and error prone. Any suggestion in this would be really helpful.
You could try integrating PowerShell with CruiseControl, our team has CC fire off the build process and then PowerShell to copy the resulting project files (code and others) to production or a test site or wherever.
I'd suggest to deal with the lack of repository control that you create a candidate Branch off your Trunk and designate that as your Integration code. Once it's settled and necessary changes have been committed or pulled, promote it to Regression for further testing. Then once that testing is successful, promote it to Production.
In this process your developers wouldn't be committing to Production directly, but instead through an iterative process a new production repository will result, whose changes can then be reintegrated into Trunk so the process can start anew for the next release.
I have a list of Jenkins jobs that are independent, but it would be convenient if I could group them together to have them all run with the click of one button. Each of the projects is concerned with deployment, not compilation.
I've found the bulk-builder plugin, but to use bulk-builder it's necessary to specify a pattern each time you wish to invoke it.
I'm looking for a Jenkins plugin that will allow me to group projects together, and the Maven system seems to suggest this is possible: I'd make a top level build job that sets up dependencies on each of the jobs I wish to run, then I'd just need to run my top level job.
If possible, has anyone found Maven to be useful in managing dependencies of anything but Java? Would I be able to use it in the way I'm expecting?
EDIT: These are all .net projects
In jenkins, you can explicitly define other projects to build upon a successful build (search for downstream). This way, you can have one project trigger bunch of others effectively grouping them.
Maven is a great tool but I wouldn't use it for this purpose.
I'm trying to figure out how to model my build process in hudson. At present most of our hudson builds are somewhat hard coded in that the build process is series of steps and we have one process per branch.
I have another build system that has many active branches and each build has a series of integration tests which require a suit of machines to execute. As I migrate from the home grown to hudson I'm not quite sure what's the right way to model this to keep sustainability costs and build times to a minimum
Here's my basic build:
create workspace
compile, link, package
transfer artifacts to test systems
invoke test harness on multiple systems to handle installation and acceptance tests
collect results
publish results
I'd like the integration part to be a group of generic machines (perhaps an elastic group) which can handle integration-tests for any branch. I want to run as much in parallel as possible to keep my build times low. It looks like the best way to execute in parallel on hudson is to break up steps into jobs and use the Parameterized Trigger Plugin to customize the generic jobs.
So, i'd have two main jobs: build, test
I could have on build job per branch and a generic test job. The build job would use Parameterized Trigger Plugin to call the test job and provide the location of the build artifacts. The test job would call a series of jobs in parallel passing down parameters for branch, artifact.
test
test-client-install (params: artifact location, branch)
test-server-install (params: artifact location, branch)
test-run (params: client machine, server machine)
join - collect results (params: client machine, server machine)
Each of the test-* jobs would pull a slave out of the group of slaves and execute. I'm not quite sure how to inform the slaves running the client and server jobs how to find each other nor am I sure how to reserve them from the pool and release them back into it.
I guess, I could have a write properties to a common share and have the sub jobs use that for inter-job communication.
Has anyone created this kind of complex setup in hudson, or is this usually done in another system with which hudson interacts (hudson + STAF with STAF managing resources)?
A few thoughts. The fewer jobs you have, the easier it is to maintain them. The more jobs you have, the more flexible you are and you can run more in parallel. Since you emphasized fast build times, have a look at the join plugin, to run a few jobs in parallel and when all of these are finished to go on with another job in that chain.
If your server is big enough, you can experiment a little bit with the clone workspace plugin. It will help you to reduce the need for manual copying files between jobs and the need for the parametrized trigger plugin.
Reserving a slave is easy. You can group the slaves with labels. In your job you define what label you node has to have in order to execute your job. A node can have more than one label and your job can be bound to more than one label. This way, Hudson decides where to put your job depending on availability. If your slaves have more than one build queue, they can run two jobs in parallel. I haven't used the locks-and-latches plugin for synchronizing across nodes. So I don't know if locks are only per node or for the whole Hudson installation. Latches are not supported yet. If you need to ensure that two jobs need to run on the same slave, try to combine them, otherwise you will lose the advantage of Hudson to distribute your jobs freely over the available nodes.
After my first question, id like to have a confirmation about the best git workflow in my case.
I have a single django project, hosted at github, and differents clones with each his own branch : customerA, customerB, demo... (think websites)
Branches share the same core but have differents data and settings (these are in gitignore)
When i work on CustomerA branch, how should i replicate some bug corrections to the other deployments ?
When i create a new general feature, i create a special branch, then merge it into my master. Then, to deploy on the 'clients', i merge the master branch into the customer branch. Is it the right way ? or should i rebase ?
# from customerA branch
git fetch origin master
git merge origin master
Also, i have created a remote branch for each customer so i can backup the customers branches to github.
It looks a very classic problem but i guess i dont use git the right way
Thanks.
Ju.
I would have a single project repo at a well-known place containing a master branch with the common code, and branches for specific deployments (e.g. customer/A customer/B demo).
Then I would have checkouts from each of these branches for each customer, for the demo server, and so on. You can let these pull automatically from their respective branch with a commit hook on the single project repo.
Every developer would have their local copy of the project repo, do local work, and then push stuff back to the single project repo.
The challenge will be to maintain the branches diverging from master and doing the regular merges so the diversion do not grow over time.
I have seen this solution describe somewhere in much more detail somewhere on the web, but I could not find it quickly again. Some blog post on using git for a staging and production web server, IIRC.
If the three sites share some 'core' code (such as a Django app) you should factor that core out into its own repo and use git submodules to include it in the other projects, rather than duplicating it.
I would have a repo called project-master or something like that and a repo for each client. Then, when you have code you need to be available to those client repos, you pull from the project-master to that repo.
Don't separate the projects in branches, separate them into different repositories.
Make the "common" code generic enough so that costumerA's copy of the common code is exactly the same as costumerB's copy of the common code.
Then, you don't have to pull or merge anything. When you update the common code, both costumerA and costumerB will get the update automagically (because they use the same common code).
By "common" code: I'm referring to the package/series-of-apps that power the websites you're developing.
I'm assuming costumerA and costumerB repositories would only include things like site-specific settings and templates.
The key here is making the "common" code generic: don't let costumerA use a "slightly modified version" of the "common" code.
Also, I'd suggest using a deployment mechanism that doesn't rely on git. git is a great source code management tool; but it's not designed (AFAIK) to be a deployment tool.