Up until now I have always created large builds, e.g. "checkin build" which simply assures that the code compiles and all tests are fine, jira and so forth (also reports like coverage, checkstyle etc.).
The I have another large build, "nightly", which does the same as above but also maven site, javadoc - that is, tasks which run for a longer time - that is, does a new checkout and builds everything again (ever night if changes in source control was registered).
Now I would like to do a "build for production", which more or less should do the same as "nightly", with the extension that it should tag and produce an artifact ready for deployment, bump version and so forth. Unfortunately I don't always have the time to wait for maven site etc to be produced, but I still need them for documentation purposes. I've been looking at build pipelines and inheritance plugin, but I don't know what is pro/cons with these - I'm missing a "best practice" here.
If I could have it my way I would like a build like "check build", then a new job does tagging and release of new version (e.g. release plugin), then a new job starts the "reporting" stuff and finally a job which creates maven sites etc., but I would only like to do one checkout. All these builds should then be triggered by the previous one which was build successfully. I have then been looking at "copy workspace", but this feels like the wrong way to do this.
Any input, ideas, experience etc. is much appreciated.
Re "[...] "copy workspace", but this feels like the wrong way to do this."
Looks like the Shared workspace plugin is what you are looking for.
Related
I'm looking for an IntelliJ IDEA plugin that would run my tests each time I change my code. I looked for such a solution and I found:
Infinitest, which works, but is inconvenient because I need to add the facet to each module, and it opens a new tool window for each module (which means 15 tool windows for me).
Fireworks - didn't work for me, maybe it just doesn't work with IDEA 14 (in its repo I can see that last changes were made in 2009). IntelliJ also reports that it throws exceptions.
There are lots of ways I could run all my tests (including writing a simple script for this), but I'm looking for a tool that would be smart enough to rerun failed tests first, and that would understand module dependencies (so after a change in some module it would run only tests of dependent modules).
I prefer free options, but if there's something paid for a reasonable price, I would accept it as well.
IntelliJ now actually has a Toggle auto-testin the run dialog. Just run a run-configuration and then select Toggle auto-testin the run dialog.
It's not as intelligent as you would have hoped. It just reruns when it detects changes.
I know this is a 3-year-old question but I think it will help people who face the similar problem in future. So I found out a way to enable SBT style auto test execution in IntelliJ studio.
We need to do 2 things to enable auto test execution.
Enabling auto project build - This can be done in settings by going into File -> Settings -> Build, Execution... -> Compiler and selecting "Build Project automatically".
Enabling "Toggle auto-test" in run dialog box
This will start auto testing. Although this works fine, it takes time to build the project even when my project is tiny so for larger projects it will certainly take very long time to complete the build and execute tests.
Reference: Original article which explains these steps
If you are OK running tests which cover a single method chosen by you, you can try this plugin (it is continuos in the sense that you make changes to a method, then click on the method and the plugin will run all the unit tests automatically which cover that method): https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/15063-unit-test-coverage-history-runner
You can use the Intellij Teamcity plugin. Teamcity is a paid product but there is a free version which gives you 20 projects and 3 agents for free .
It has a remote run feature using which you can send in unchecked code to run tests before committing.
It also has options to run failed tests first
Usage instructions for Remote Run
I have an existing project in Eclipse (let's call it "NotPlayProj") which has a lot of java code still under development. I made a new eclipse project using play 2.1.0 (let's call it "PlayProj"). My goal is to use code from NotPlayProj in PlayProj and have both Eclipse and the Play compiler notice changes in either project.
If I go into the properties for PlayProj and add NotPlayProj via the Project tab, then method completion and inclusion works within eclipse, but the Play compile doesn't see the result. I've looked at Play modules and those don't seem to do what I want.
Is there any way to do this, ideally without modifying the NotPlayProj?
Edit ---
I've looked at http://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.0/SBTDependencies which shows how to export a jar from NotPlayProj into the PlayProj/lib directory, but this requires a manual export for each time NotPlayProject changes. I suspect that the Managed dependency section is supposed to cover this, but I've never used SBT before and am therefore probably missing something basic.
What you need is continuous integration.
Have a look at Jenkins: http://jenkins-ci.org/
You should setup a Continuous integration server and customize the builds you need.
Example:
You have your PlayProj running in some server, it needs to be able to use some of the latest classes from the other project called NoPlayProj.
Rebuild is a must, things such as downtime zero are difficult to achieve(At least I don't think this is what you are asking for either).
The steps you need to automate with Jenkins are:
1 - Build and deploy the latest version of NoPlayProj which is located in some repositorium
2 - Build and deploy the latest version of PlayProj which is located in some repositorium and also is contains your last commit where you updated the dependency that exist with NoPlayProj
A not very complex build and deployment instructions can be configured in Jenkins. This should speed you up a bit.
Also another suggestion would be to mavenize both projects if possible, this will help you manage the dependencies easier.
Just to clarify one thing, you said: My goal is to use code from NotPlayProj in PlayProj and have both Eclipse and the Play compiler notice changes in either project.
Well the order in which you execute the builds will be dependent in what you want to do as long as you update the dependency before you commit the code.
One last thing, if you don't want to deploy you don't have to do so you can create the Jenkins jobs, in such ways that you only build. With Jenkins you can do a lot of stuff, also you could execute some help scripts of your own that can provide you additional functionality.
I hope this was useful.
To let Eclipse see changes in NotPlayProj when working with PlayProj, it's enough to change configuration of PlayProj. Properties-> Java build path -> Projects -> Add NotPlayProj as dependency.
There is no straightforward way to let Play compiler handle dependencies, until you package it as jar. Consider configuration of simple ant task (External tools configuration -> Ant build ), which will copy your jar file. Task can be triggered by pressing the key or button.
With managed dependencies, every time you made change in NotPlayProj, you have to manually rebuild it. To let Ivy/Maven put dependency in your local repository. After that Play will take latest snapshot from your local repository.
Both approaches requires some efforts. Maybe you can take a look at Python scripts, which run Play, maybe it's enough to extend classpath with NotPlayProj when executing play start
Though I've never used the play framework, I would think that there is a format that both the play framework and eclipse understand and that is Maven. Look at http://www.playframework.com/modules/maven-head/home
I have a project that's currently built with ant that pulls the latest trunk version of Solr in through git and then builds through ant. I'm pretty used to Maven and its system for dependencies at this point and find our old ant way of doing things pretty messy and hard to maintain. With that said, basically everywhere I seem to look online, people are building solr with Ant, and the few tutorials I found for doing things with Maven are all along the lines of this one, which doesn't seem to work.
So, to be clear, all I'm looking for here is a clean way to develop the project in Eclipse and to be able to deploy it. I'm sure someone must have done this before and must have a good answer. I'd be really interested in hearing it.
I just got it working by throwing all dependencies into Maven, making my own repo for a pegged version of Solr 4.0-SNAPSHOT, copying the web.xml from it into src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/, and running things through mvn jetty:run with salient variables passed in as arguments as:
mvn jetty:run -Dsolr.dataDir="./solr-data" -Dsolr.master-host="localhost" -Dsolr.solr.home="./solr-home"
This method is officially unsupported, but it means I no longer have to bother with ugly ant configs or holding all of Lucene and Solr in git repos attached to my project, so I could build from them. It also means changing/updating versions just requires a one line change in my pom.xml instead of digging through and switching a whole ton of extraneous configs. I'm pretty happy, and once I got a better feel for how Solr is supposed to work, reconfiguring the project really wasn't that bad.
This answer is probably more a comment, but a comment is too small to expose it all.
I know nothing about Solr, but from a neutral point of view, I would say you have two options:
Mavenize Solr (looks like what is suggested by your article). Maybe you could post another question on what problems you encounter using their solution.
Invoke the original ant tasks using the maven-antrun-plugin. This would also probably require to attach the built jars (or if it only contains classes/resources, jar them first). You could decide to install them locally using maven-install-plugin or attach them with maven-build-helper-plugin.
In eclipse, there are plenty of tricks to access the built files. You could simply add the project as a dependency.
This second option should work, but I don't find it very clean
You should be able to use Maven if you want, I know some of the Solr developers do. Have a look here: http://wiki.apache.org/solr/HowToContribute#Maven. This isn't the most supported way though, and I can't help you with this since I never tried it.
I actually work with Solr + Ant and there's basically a task for everything: ant test, ant dist and so on. I agree that's a bit old fashioned, but it works. Lately the build has been improved a lot introducing Ivy as dependency management tool, in order to remove all jars from the source tree.
Let me know if you have some specific problems with ant, maybe I can help you more.
I am trying to set up a headless build for a big eclipse feature, containing other features and plugins.
As some needed plugins are generated using GMF and EMF, the build workflow must be something like this:
SVN Check-out
Invoke Generation
Run Tests
Build all
Publish update-site
Over the last couple of weeks, i played around with PDE Headless Build and Buckminster. Anyhow i still got problems with both and can't decide on which i should spent my effort.
So what would you prefer? What experience you made? Anybody out there who needed to set up a similiar workflow before?
Thank you for all answers :)
Buckminster sits on top of PDE build, so there's no getting away from PDE build in the near future.
You could try another free plug-in that sits on top of PDE build: Plugin Builder as it does the generation of the ANT XML and the nasty map file that PDE build requires. It even has the extension for SVN-based map files as opposed to CSV. I successfully setup Plugin Builder running from Hudson for my team's build needs.
Another alternative is to look at Tycho (Tycho is the OSGi/Eclipse related bit of the next version of Maven). It is a work-in-progress and it does use PDE build under the covers. I tried and failed with some experiments with Tycho, but they do have a recent new alpha/beta build, so you may have more success (and there are other people who are successfully using it).
The only problem I've had with PDE build is the map file for checking out. I wrote my own ant task to do the checkout for me using SVN, based on conventions on where the plugins are located, instead of having to explicitly state in the map file all the file paths. Worked wonders and now I can just add plugins to my svn repository and refer to them in the feature.xml and it just works.
We're building using buckminster(check out, compiling, testing and byte obfuscation). I haven't tried a PDE-script, but if you have a complicated setup with a lot of dependencies on other libraries/projects I think buckminster will scale better.
I've recently started to move our entire Eclipse build-infrastructure from PDE build to Buckminster, and I have mostly good things to say about Buckminster. While builds based on the PDE build scripts/templates tend to be very brittle and requires a large amount of surrounding infrastructure to work, Buckminster feels quite robust and does not require any significant additional scripting around it. Buckminster does take a while to get into, but thanks to the excellent documentation and the very helpful newsgroup, I was able to get a full build to work in a few days.
Buckminster is what Eclipse should've had from the very beginning to handle headless builds.
I see reference of ant a lot but I don't get exactly what its meant to do? from what i've heard its supposed to compile your projects but can't i just do that by clicking Run->Run in eclipse?
Edit : I guess I should rephrase my question. I already know that ant is a 'build automation software', my question is, what exactly is build automation? I thought that you're supposed to test your app, and when it is running you click the 'build' button in eclipse or through command-line java, and it makes a .jar file out of it? So why do you need to 'automate' this process?
I already know that ant is a 'build automation software', my question is, what exactly is build automation? I thought that you're supposed to test your app, and when it is running you click the 'build' button in eclipse or through command-line java, and it makes a .jar file out of it? So why do you need to 'automate' this process?
Not all the Java development is done through eclipse and not all the jars may be built from the command line ( or should be built from the command line ) .
You may need additionally run test cases, unit tests, and many, many other process.
What ant does, is provide a mechanism to automate all this work ( so you don't have to do it every time ) and perhaps you may invoke this ant script each day at 6 p.m.
For instance, in some projects, a daily build is needed, the following are the task that may be automated with ant, so they can run without human intervention.
Connect to subversion server.
Download/update with the latest version
Compile the application
Run the test cases
Pack the application ( in jar, war, ear, or whatever )
Commit this build binaries to subversion.
Install the application in a remote server
Restart the server
Send an email with the summary of the job.
Of course for other projects this is overkill, but for some others is very helpful.
rogeriopvl is absolutely correct, but to answer your "can't I just do that by clicking Run->Run in Eclipse?" question: that's fine for a project that you're working on on your own, and don't need a repeatable, scriptable build in multiple environments.
If you're working on an open source project, however, or professional software which needs to be able to build on a build server etc, requiring a particular IDE to be running isn't a good idea.
Ant is used to automate a build process, but a build process is often much more than compiling. Ant has "tasks" that can be used to perform miscellaneous useful functions. You can create your own task to do just about anything by writing a java class and telling ant where to find it. You can then mix and match these tasks to create targets that will execute a set of tasks.
You can also set up a dynamic environment in which to build your application. You can set up property files to hold variables that can be used in the build process, i.e. to hold file paths, class paths, etc. This is useful for instance to differentiate between test and production builds where deployment paths, database instances, etc. might change. Ant also includes flow control (if, etc.)
Some things I've seen ant do:
Compile code
Use version control to checkout the latest version or to tag the version being built
Run sql scripts to build or rebuild a test database
Copy files from an external resource for inclusion in a project
Bundle code into a jar, war or ear file
Deploy a web application to an application server
Restart an application server
Execute a test suite
Static analysis, i.e. CheckStyle or PMD
Send email to a team to alert them to a build.
Generate files based on information from the build.
Example: I have a jsp in my app that does nothing but display version/build information. It is generated by ant when I run a build, and the production operations team checks this page when they deploy the application to make sure they've deployed the correct build.
In many larger companies (and likely some smaller ones), you'll find that production code is not built by the people who developed it. Instead, the developers may check their code into a source code repository and tag it. Then they give this tag to a build team.
The build team, in a separate (clean) area - possibly on some headless server (i.e. with no GUI) - will then check out the code and run a build script. The build script will be completely independent of the desktop environment/IDE.
This ensures that nothing which happens to be on any one developer's computer is "polluting" the build. (Or, more likely, nothing outside source control is required for the system to work!)
So most software you use will never, ever be built from a developer's desktop.
PS. You might also want to look at the idea of Continuous Integration
The short answer is that Ant is a great way to create a complete project build that is independent of any particular tool any developer may be using. Without an independent build, things can go haywire quickly - especially for large project teams.
And now for the long answer... I have been brought into several projects without any sense of an independent build. On one project, there was one guy who was not a developer that was tasked with building and deploying the software. He had created 147 separate windows batch files to compile each EJB, each servlet, and each client component. There was no error checking for this build. All log messages, including error messages went to standard out. It was up to him to manually recognize by reading this log which exception or message printed was a normal and which message was an error. He also had to deploy this software he just built. Deploying was equally as complex since there were several load-balanced tiers. Each module had to be placed in the right place manually with options setup to match downstream and upstream tiers. Building and deploying this software took him at least 3 days using this method. Of course, only then could anyone determine if the build "worked". Usually, after this period all the programmers would scramble to debug the build. Programmers would say my module works fine in my IDE. I just click run like this, see?
Indeed, the individual software modules usually worked, but the build and deployment was horribly ineffective. And just as bad, it was equally as difficult for anyone to deploy a build to more than one environment. Management would say, ok you now have this build working in our regression testing environment. Now deploy that same build in this other environment so the sales guys can demo up and coming software. That should be simple to do, but it also took at least 2 days, followed by a "debugging the build" period. Builds and deploys were never simple and never accurate. It really slowed the project down.
Anyway, we replaced this entire procedure with a complete Ant based build and deploy mechanism. The end result was that a complete build could be created and deployed in less than 30 minutes, completely automated. The QA guy managing the builds and deploys could keep a whiteboard of which environment had which build deployed to it and which group was using that environment. This was something that was just not possible with the old system.
Ant is for automating software build processes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Ant
Ant allows CRISP (complete, repeatable, informative, schedulable, portable) builds. You can find great info on it in this presentation by Mike Clark and in his book, Pragmatic Project Automation.
Ant is a build tool, akin to makefiles (albeit with a very different syntax in XML). If you're only using Eclipse it's fine to stick to that and you can always convert an Ant build file into an Eclipse project (Eclipse's launch configurations are then, if I remember correctly, the equivalent of Ant's build targets).
If you want to deploy the source code of the application and allow others to easily build or set it up, automating that using Ant is probably not a bad idea. But it's usually not a consistent experience for users or at least I haven't seen much consensus on what targets should be there and doing what so far.
Ant may also be used for regular automated builds (you wouldn't want to hit Run in Eclipse every night, right? :-))
If there's one close to you I think you'd get a lot out of CITCON, the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference. You get to talk with lots of people about the benefits of automation applied to building and testing software.
Basically people use Ant (with other tools) to automate everything they want to have happen after a commit. The basic advantages of such automation are faster, better and cheaper.
Faster because things happen right away without waiting for a human to get around to it.
Better because computers are really really good at doing the same thing the same way every time. (Humans tend to suck at that.)
Cheaper because you have fewer mistake and the mistakes that occur are caught sooner and therefore cheaper to fix.
You are also referring to the ""Export ant buildfile".
If you write your own Ant script for building your application outside eclipse, you can write your own targets that use the Ant task to delegate to the generated build.xml.
Also, you can configure a project's 'builders' (project properties ยป Builders) to run any script (ant or otherwise) you want when you build the project, manually or automatically.
Joel (Spolsky) has a great article on "The Joel Test." Many of them revolve around being able to do important things often, quickly and reliably. One of those things is your build.
Eclipse is using ant for building, running, deploying, ...
"Ant is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like Make, without Make's wrinkles and with the full portability of pure Java code." (from link text