Dockerization Part 2: Deploying

Now that we have containers, we need to push them to our subprod environments so they can be tested. Bear with me, this is where things get a little complicated. Docker Setup Most people take the easy way out when they move to docker: they ship their containers to the cloud and let someone else manage the installation, upgrades, and maintenance on the docker hosts. We don’t do things the easy way around these parts, though, so we have our own server farm: a series of VMs in our datacenter. Continue reading

Dockerization Part 1: Building

I’ve been long overdue for a series of articles explaining how our current build system works. One of the major projects I was involved with before this recent reorg involved overhauling our manual build process into a shiny new CI/CD system that would take the code from commit to production in a regulated, automated fashion. As always, the reward for doing a good job is more work like that; when we decided to move to Docker to better support our new team structure, I ended up doing a lot of the foundational work on our new build-test-deliver pipeline. Continue reading

How to force Bamboo to build on Linux

So let’s talk about build servers for a minute. I manage the company’s Bamboo server, which we use to do builds and continuous integration. I don’t know if this is an unusual use case or what, but some of my builds require Windows and others perform best on Linux. So we have Windows agents and Linux agents. Some things you would think are intuitive are not. For example, there’s no way to differentiate in a Script Task between CMD and Bash. Continue reading

Teatime: Continuous Integration

Welcome back to Teatime! This is a weekly feature in which we sip tea and discuss some topic related to quality. Feel free to bring your tea and join in with questions in the comments section. Tea of the week: Oprah Chai. I expected this to be boring and gimmicky, but it was surprisingly bold, and a pleasant drink all-around. I tried it at a Starbucks before I bought some, which is a nice perk. Continue reading

Teatime: Continuous Deployment

Welcome back to Teatime! This is a weekly feature in which we sip tea and discuss some topic related to quality. Feel free to bring your tea and join in with questions in the comments section. Tea of the week: An old standby, Twinings Ceylon Orange Pekoe. There’s no orange flavor in it; the Orange refers to the size of the leaves. It’s a good staple tea I can find in my local supermarkets, solid and dependable — just like a deployment pipeline should be. Continue reading

Quick Tip: passing parameters from Jenkins to Maven

I saw bits and pieces of information all over the internet about parameters and properties and command-line arguments, but what I was looking for I didn’t find: a simple, straightforward explanation of how to use a Paramaterized Build in Jenkins to pass arguments through to the jUnit tests that run the functional tests that I’ve built on Webdriver. So: here it is! Step 1: Command-line via Maven to jUnit Use the System. Continue reading

CI with Jenkins for Javascript: Part 3: Scheduling and reporting

In Part One, we set up a Jenkins server and some unit testing. In Part Two, we added some static analysis tools to our build. But we’re still manually running all this, even if it’s all tied together now. Let’s talk about some of the features Jenkins brings to the table. Building automatically Our code release pipeline is going through some revisions to make better use of branching, so I have the good fortune of being able to detail for you two different build strategies for two different types of branching strategies. Continue reading