I would like to perform the config transform for multiple environments upon Team City build. Essentially I would like to transform my config file for dev, test and live as part of a single TC build.
I was hoping I would be able to use Slow Cheetah as part of an extra build step within team city however I don't really know an awful lot about Slow Cheetah.
Has anyone come across this issue or something similar before?
Cheers Dee
Here's an article which describes what your looking for:
Slow Cheetah Build Server Support Updated
Related
Say there are 1-10 user stories. All tested okay. -> to Production. Then comes the CR with 5 more user stories. All then tested okay. -> to production.
Then comes 5 more user stories. Tested okay. -> To production.. now here a user story or two from first 1- 10 breaks down. Obviously testers will have to carry the blame for the same.
Developers have direct access to the QA environments' build path. any developer can go put the code file there. just a simple folder structure.
How do we fix this and keep 'our' hands clean?
Also Please note that we do ad-hoc testing due to the stringent timelines.
The situation when something new breaks down something old is rather common. I cannot see what is the problem. QA environment is perfectly good for catching up such a regression.
What i can suggest is:
1. Having Development / QA / Production environments
And try to set up the proper process of if sth new has been coded up and developer-tested it can go to 'QA'. And only when the new stuff has been QA-tested it can go to 'Production';
2. Continuous Build Integration
It's also nice to have the key features covered with the unit tests or (and) to have a suite of automated tests. One button-click can show you the general state of your app and even whose check-in has failed the build.
3. Regression testing
Ensure you have a profound Regression suite. These are run mainly to avoid such problems and verify that no critical issues leak into the production.
Hope this helps a little.
Goal is to run a few queries against a database on each new build? Has anyone had any luck without having to put sql in java classes or creating entire new schemas to hold stored procs? Ideally you can include some SQLs in separate files that get run as soon as the build completes.
Might be using maven,bamboo but would love to hear any experiences/successes/difficulties that people have encountered.
You don't say what tools you use for writing you SQL unit tests. If you're using Steven Feuerstein's utplsql tool you should read this artcle on Continuous Integration with Oracle PL/SQL, utPLSQL and Hudson. And even if you're not it might provide some useful insights.
Maybe Team City (Jetbrains) is what you're looking for. It has various build runners, including but not limited to Ant, MS Build, NUnit, Maven and Command Line.
Just configure a TC-project to listen to your svn/git/hg repository for changes, then run a build: first compilation and if successful then Maven (or whatever). Or which-ever way you want to do it.
/mikkel
I was trying out TestCocoon the other day, and everything seemed great. I compiled my code using cscl,cslib and cslink and I was expecting this to take care of all the instrumentation. I get some .csmes files and .exe.csmes files, but when I load them into the CoverageBrowser I cannot see anything relevant. No covered/uncovered lines. All the lines are grey.
Is anything else needed in order for TestCocoon to report coverage? Do I need to modify my source files? I also posted on their forums here, but no result:
http://www.testcocoon.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=44
I tried this tool with few projects using Visual Studio 2008, and I found:
Pros:
- it can collect results from multiple runs, you can run your software at different machines and collect results together
- it has useful GUI for browsing results
- you can merge coverage from many modules and anlyse it as whole application
- forum works, I submited two problems and got implemented fixtures in few days
- it works almost without any problems (I found two minor compilation problems) with quite complicated sources, with tons of templates, boost::spirit parsers, other boost stuff (including meta-programming modules etc.), STL, Qt (everything together)
- well documented
- it's free
Cons:
- instrumentation is definitely slow
- multi-process single project compilation using Visual Studio 2008 doesn't work, only one file at a time is compiled which makes building slower (you will get better performance building whole solution with many projects)
At this moment I didn't try to use this tool for continuous coverage measurement.
Either way, in my opinion it's worth to try.
BTW, Tony, PC-Lint is static-analysis tool, isn't it? interesting idea to compare it with dynamic-analysis tool...
TestCocoon (now at 1.6.7) works well with the small C code bases we tend to unit test. The performance impact seems about normal for other instrumentation methods we've used.
We are able to extract coverage information in our makefiles and the coverage browser is very useful.
Dont use testcocoon, I am currently using it, and its shoddy as hell. Pay for something better (it will cost alot). It is the ultimate death sentence, seriously, don't do it. Whatever you do, stay away from testcocoon at all costs. Worst move ever. You might as well sell your kids for drug money.
About 2 months ago I overtook building proccess in current company. Even though I don't have much knowledge of it, I was the only with enough time, so I didn't have much choice.
Situation is not that good, and I would like to do following:
Labeling files in SourceSafe with version (example ProjectName PV 1.2)
GetFiles from SourceSafe to specific directory
Build vb6/c++/c# projects(yes, there are all kinds of them)
Build InstallShield setups
This is for now partly done using batch scripts(one for labeling and getting, one for building, etc..). So when building start I pretty much have babysit it.
Good part of this code could be reused.
Any recommendations on how to do it better? One big problem is whole bunch of dependencies between projects. Also labeling has to increment version and if necessary change PV to EV.
I would like to minimize user interaction as much as possible. One click on one build script(Spolsky is god) and all is done, no need to increment version, to set where to get files and similar stuff.
Is the batch scripting best way to go? Should I do some functionality with msbuild. Are there any other options?
Specific code is not need, for now I just need a way how to improve it, even though it wouldn't hurt.
Tnx,
Marko
Since you already have a build system (even though some of it currently "manual"), whatever you do, don't start over from scratch.
(1) Make sure you have a test machine (or Virtual Machine) on which to work. Thus you can make changes and improvements without having to worry about breaking anything.
(2) Put all of your build scripts and tools in version control, not just the source code. Then as you make changes, see if they work. If they do, then save them to version control. If they don't, then roll them back.
(3) Choose one area to work on at a time. Don't try to do everything at once. Going from a lot of manual work to "one-click" will take time no matter what build system you're working with.
Sounds like you want a continuous integration solution, like CC.Net. It has configuration options to do all the things you want and a great community to answer questions.
Also, batch scripting is probably not a good option. Sophisticated build and integration tools will let you feed parameters into the build and create different builds for different environments (test, production, etc.). Batch scripting will involve a lot of hand-coding and glue.
I am not an experimented user of SCM tools, even though I am convinced of their usefulness, of course.
I used some obscure commercial tool in a former job, Perforce in the current one, and played a bit with TortoiseSVN for my little personal projects, but I disliked having lot of .svn folders all over the place, making searches, backups and such more difficult.
Then I discovered the interest of distributed SCM and I chose to go the apparently simpler (than git) Mercurial way, still for my personal, individual needs. I am in the process of learning to use it properly, having read part of the wiki and being in the middle of the excellent PDF book.
I see often repeated, for example in Mercurial working practices, "don't hesitate to use multiple trees locally. Mercurial makes this fast and light-weight." and "for each feature you work on, create a new tree.".
These are interesting and sensible advices, but they hurt a bit my little habits with centralized SCM, where we have a "holy" central repository where branches are carefully planned (and handled by administrators), changelists must be checked by (senior) peers and must not break the builds, etc. :-) Starting to work on a new branch takes quite some time...
So I have two questions in the light of above:
How practical is it to do lot of clones, in the context of IDEs and such? What if the project has configuration/settings files, makefiles or Ant scripts or shell scripts or whatever, needing path updates? (yes, probably a bad idea...) For example, in Eclipse, if I want to compile and run a clone, I have to do yet another project, tweaking the Java build path, the Run/Debug targets, and so on. Unless an Eclipse plugin ease that task. Do I miss some facility here?
How do that scale? I have read Hg is OK for large code bases, but I am perplex. At my job, we have a Java application (well, several around a big common kernel) of some 2 millions of lines, weighting some 110MB for code alone. Doing a clean compile on my old (2004) Windows workstation takes some 15 minutes to generate the 50MB of class files! I don't see myself cloning the whole project to change 3 files. So what are the practices here?
I haven't yet seen these questions addressed in my readings, so I hope this will make a useful thread.
You raise some good points!
How practical is it to do lot of clones, in the context of IDEs and such?
You're right that it can be difficult to manage many clones when IDEs and other tools depend on absolute paths. Part of it can be solved by always using relative paths in your configuration files -- making sure that a source checkout can compile from any location is a good goal in itself, no matter what revision control system you use :-)
But when you cannot or dont want to bother with several clones, then please note that a single clone can cope with multiple branches. The "hgbook" emphasizes many clones since this is a conceptually simple and very safe way of working. When you get more experience you'll see that you can use multiple heads in a single repository (perhaps by naming them with bookmarks) to do the same.
How do that scale?
Cloning a 110 MB repository should be quite fast: it depends on how long it takes to write 110 MB to your disk. In a recent message to the Mercurial mailinglist it was reported that cloning 6.3 GB took 4 minutes -- scaling that down to 110 MB gives about 4 seconds. That should be fast enough that your tea is still warm :-) Part of the trick is that the history data are simply hard-linked (yes, also on Windows) and so it is only a matter of writing out the files in the working copy.
PhiLo: I'm new at this, but mercurial also has "internal branches" that you can use within a single repository instead of cloning it.
Instead of
hg clone toto toto-bug-434
you can do
cd toto
hg branch bug-434
hg update bug-434
...
hg commit
hg update default
to create a branch and switch back and forth. Your built files not under rev control won't go away when you switch branches, some of them will just go out of date as the underlying sources are modified. Your IDE will rebuild what's needed and no more. It works much like CVS or subversion.
You should still have clean 'incoming' and 'outgoing' repositories in addition to your 'work' repository. Just that your 'work' can serve multiple purposes.
That said, you should clone your work repo before attempting anything intricate. If anything goes wrong you can throw the clone away and start over.
Question 1:
PIDA IDE has pretty good Mercurial integration. We also use Mercurial for development itself. Personally I have about 15 concurrent clones going of some projects, and the IDE copes fine. We don't have the trouble of tweaking build scripts etc, we can "clone and go".
It is so easy that in many cases I will clone to the bug number like:
hg clone http://pida.co.uk/hg pida-345
For bug #345, and I am ready to fix.
If you are having to tweak build scripts depending on the actual checkout directory of your application, I might consider that your build scripts should be using some kind of project-relative path, rather than hard-coded paths.