Is there a way to run an ant build such that you get an output of what the build would do, but without actually doing it?
That is to say, it would list all of the commands that would be submitted to the system, output the expansion of all filesets, etc.
When I've searched 'ant' and 'test', I get overwhelming hits for running tests with ant. Any suggestions on actually testing ant build files?
It seems, that you are looking for a "dry run".
I googled it a bit and found no evidence that this is supoorted.
Heres a bugzilla-request for that feature, that explains things a bit:
https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=35464
This is impossible in theory and in practice. In theory, you cannot test a program meaningfully without actually running it (basically the halting problem).
In practice, since individual ant tasks very often depend on each other's output, this would be quite pointless for the vast majority of Ant scripts. Most of them compile some source code and build JARs from the class files - but what would the fileset for the JAR contain if the compiler didn't actually run?
The proper way to test an Ant script is to run it regularly, but on a test system, possibly a VM image that you can restory to the original state easily.
Here's a problem: You have target #1 that builds a bunch of stuff, then target #2 that copies it.
You run your Ant script in test mode, it pretends to do target #1. Now it comes to target #2 and there's nothing to copy. What should target #2 return? Things can get even more confusing when you have if and unless clauses in your ant targets.
I know that Make has a command line parameter that tells it to run without doing a build, but I never found it all that useful. Maybe that's why Ant doesn't have one.
Ant does have a -k parameter to tell it to keep going if something failed. You might find that useful.
As Michael already said, that's what Test Systems - VM's come in handy- are for
From my ant bookmarks => some years ago some tool called "Virtual Ant" has been announced, i never tried it. So don't regard it as a tip but as something someone heard of
From what the site says =
"With Virtual Ant you no longer have to get your hands dirty with XML to create or edit Ant build scripts. Work in a completely virtualized environment similar to Windows Explorer and run your tasks on a Virtual File System to see what they do, in real time, without affecting your real file system*. The actual Ant build script is generated in the background."
Hm, sounds to good to be true ;-)
..without affecting your real file system.. might be what you asked for !?
They provide a 30day trial license so you won't lose no money but only the time to have a look on..
Related
I have a bamboo build with 2 stages: Build&Test and Publish. The way bamboo works, if Build&Test fails, Publish is not run. This is usually the way that I want things.
However, sometimes, Build&Test will fail, but I still want Publish to run. Typically, this is a manual process where even though there is a failing test, I want to push a button so that I can just run the Publish stage.
In the past, I had two separate plans, but I want to keep them together as one. Is this possible?
From the Atlassian help forum, here:
https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/52863/how-do-i-run-just-a-single-stage-of-a-build
Short answer: no. If you want to run a stage, all prior stages have to finish successfully, sorry.
What you could do is to use the Quarantine functionality, but that involves re-running the failed job (in yet-unreleased Bamboo 4.1, you may have to press "Show more" on the build result screen to see the re-run button).
Another thing that could be helpful in such situation (but not for OP) is disabling jobs.
Generally speaking, the best solution to most Bamboo problems is to rely on Bamboo as little as possible because you ultimately can't patch it.
In this case, I would just quickly write / re-use a aynchronous dependency resolution mechanism (something like GNU Make and its targets), and run that from a single stage.
Then just run everything on the default all-like target, and let users select the target on a custom run variable.
When using Common Test with Erlang on Windows, I run into a lot of bugs with Common Test and Erlang. For one, if there are any spaces in the project's path, Common Test often fails outright. To workaround this, I moved the project to a path with no spaces (but I really wish the devs would fix the libraries so they work better on Windows). Now, I got Common Test to mostly run, except it won't print out the HTML report at the end. This is the error I get after the tests run:
Testing myapp.ebin: EXIT, reason {
{badmatch,{error,enoent}},
[{test_server_ctrl,start_minor_log_file1,4,
[{file,"test_server_ctrl.erl"},{line,1959}]},
{test_server_ctrl,run_test_case1,11,
[{file,"test_server_ctrl.erl"},{line,3761}]},
{test_server_ctrl,run_test_cases_loop,5,
[{file,"test_server_ctrl.erl"},{line,3032}]},
{test_server_ctrl,run_test_cases,3,
[{file,"test_server_ctrl.erl"},{line,2294}]},
{test_server_ctrl,ts_tc,3,
[{file,"test_server_ctrl.erl"},{line,1434}]},
{test_server_ctrl,init_tester,9,
[{file,"test_server_ctrl.erl"},
{line,1401}]}]}
This happened in sometimes in Erlang R15 and older if the test function names were either too long or had too many underscores in the name (which I suspect is also a bug) or when too many tests failed (which means Common Test is useless to me for TDD). But now it happens on every ct:run from Common Test in R15B01. Does anyone know how I can workaround this? Has anyone had any success with TDD and Common Test on Windows?
Given the last comment you might want to disable the buildin_hooks. You can do this by passing the following to ct:run/1 or ct_run
{enable_builtin_hooks,false}
That should disable the cth_log_redirect hook and maybe solve your problem during overload.
Does anyone know of an existing solution to help write tests for a NSIS script?
The motivation is the benefit of knowing whether modifying an existing installation script breaks it or has undesired side effects.
Unfortunately, I think the answer to your question depends at least partially on what you need to verify.
If all you are worried about is that the installation copies the right file(s) to the right places, sets the correct registry information etc., then almost any unit testing tool would probably meet your needs. I'd probably use something like RSpec2, or Cucumber, but that's because I am somewhat familiar with Ruby and like the fact that it would be an xcopy deployment if the scripts needed to be run on another machine. I also like the idea of using a BDD-based solution because the use of a domain-specific language that is very close to readable text would mean that others could more easily understand, and if necessary modify, the test specification when necessary.
If, however you are concerned about the user experience (what progress messages are shown, etc.) then I'm not sure that the tests you would need could be as easily expressed... or at least not without a certain level of pain.
Good Luck! Don't forget to let other people here know when/if you find a solution you like.
Check out Pavonis.
With Pavonis you can compile your NSIS script and get the output of any errors and warnings.
Another solution would be AutoIT.
You can compile your install using Jenkins and the NSIS command line compiler, set up an AutoIT test script and have Jenkins run the test.
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 have a question related to MSBuild script. My scenario is if build fails, build output should be copied into local system. If build passes, build output goes into a server destination folder.
Can anybody help me out? I am trying this with MSBuild not with Teambuilds.
Thanks
Shanthi
If your build fails then the output will be in an unknown indeterminable state that will be of little use to you, so there is little or no point in copying it to a local location. If the build fails then the final task which copies the output to the network won't be executed, so that problem is taken care of.
If you still want to handle errors and execute certain tasks upon failure, then this page has some good suggestions. Alternatively, you may find the need to write your own task to do specifically what you want (writing tasks is very easy), this link will help you with that.