Continuum Help

Question

Hi all,

I am the Configuration manager for an IT firm, Currently we a 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?

Regards, Suraj.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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.