BeautifulBuilds

@RoyOsheroveBouvet

roy@osherove.comcourses

consulting

beautifulbuilds.com

Why do we have builds?

Builds and tests are made to be broken

What’s beautiful?

• See flow• Ease of change• Coherent

Recommendations

• Use the right tools for build and CI• Use the right patterns to allow extra benefits

Part of a Build Process

• Build Script/editor• Build Server / CI Server• Build Environments

What’s the difference?

• Automated Build (what to do)• Continuous Integration (when to do it)

Build Scripts (Bat)Procedural

Xml Build Scripts (Ant) - declarative

Domain Specific Language Build Scripts (Rake)

declarative

Declarative• [Ant, nant,msbuild] (http://ant.apache.org/)• [Automake] (http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/)• [Boost Build] (http://www.boost.org/doc/tools/build/index.html)• [Cmake] (http://www.cmake.org/)• [Make] (http://www.gnu.org/software/make/)• [Ocamlbuild] (http://gallium.inria.fr/~pouillar/)• [Omake] (http://omake.metaprl.org/index.html)• [Qmake] (http://doc.trolltech.com/4.2/qmake-manual.html)• [Rake] (http://rake.rubyforge.org/)• [SCons] (http://www.scons.org/)• [Waf] (http://code.google.com/p/waf/)

Procedural

• FinalBuilder• Visual build pro• Batch files• Powersell scripts

Visual Build Scripts (FinalBuilder)

Which one?

• Visual editing allows seeing FLOW• Easy to update and change by newbies• Easy to debug

• FinalBuilder or Visual Build Pro on windows• Rake on linux or mac

The Right CI Tools

TeamCity

Jenkins

CruiseControl

Hudson

Many others. Which one?

• Support build agents• Support amazon ec2 auto scaling agents• Easy to setup and maintain• Free for a small team

• TeamCity is awesome

But some CI servers support build actions too!

Hardware

• Build Machine (with teamcity)– + agent machines (optional)

• Test Machine• Staging Machine• Production Machine

• This can all be in the cloud (EC2 is wonderful)

Build Configurations

• Continuous Integration Build• Slow Build (nightly, optional)• Deploy to test servers• Deploy to staging servers (optional)• Deploy to production

Build Script Injection

• Allow version aware builds• Build scripts are part of source control• Build configurations on the CI server are dumb

triggers

Fill In The Blanks

• Build Script uses placeholders for system related knowledge

• Placeholders are filled from environment variables or other types of parameters to the command line

• These variables are SET by the Build Configuration on the CI server

Location Agnostic Scripts

Extract Script

Build Chain Triggers

Triggered by checkin

Triggered by end of previous

Manual

Manual

Slow Builds

Do X

Do X + Y

Do X + Y + Z

Do X + y + Z + N

Cumulative, Fast Builds

How Fast?

Shipping Skeleton

• Start by releasing• Deploy a hello world empty skeleton• Then fill out the product• Continue adding small build features as you go

along

roy@osherove.comcourses

consulting

beautifulbuilds.com

@RoyOsheroveBouvet