This saturday was dedicated to do some tests with automated build and Jenkins / Maven. Jenkins is a brilliant tool to let a server do some automated tasks. Maven is the tool which delivers a configuration language to describe how to build something. The goal of maven is to do the same thing always in the same way. For me as a highly creative person is doing the same thing always in the same way, a creativity killer. So I think Maven will be my friend, because he is doing all the annoying jobs for me.
But Maven needs some clear instructions to do his stuff right. And like Eclipse needs Maven also a clear environment to work. Based on some research on the SBT Project and with the help of my friend Google, I figured out that I need eclipse.tycho to build plugins, features and update sites. I had prior to saturday already done the following steps:
- Setup of Jenkins
- Setup of Maven
- Setup of Git (for Grabbing the Project direct form the GitHub)
I started with the parent pom.xml file. This file contains all instructions and dependencies for all my plugin. The full file can be read here.
The important thing was to define the following repository:
<repositories> <repository> <id>notes</id> <layout>p2</layout> <url>${notes-platform}</url> </repository> </repositories>As I sad. Maven needs a clear environment to build all the plugins and the eclipse.tycho needs a repository, where all the plugins of the domino runtime are located. Unfortunately such a repository is currently not available. So I had to create a p2 update site. This is in fact the same, as you define your eclipse development environment to use a specific target platform. See the following instruction, how I did that.
As you can see in the repository definition, I’ve nut used in the <url> tag a fix url. It’s a variable, which can be sent to Maven in the command line. This has the good impact that I can use my new update site also as a file resource. To build my POI4XPages Project, I had only to checkout all the code from git, switch to the feature/CIandMavenIntegration branch and go to the root directory of the project:
mvn clean install -Dnotes-platform=file:///D:/updatesite/site.p2/
did the job…. almost 🙂
The next problem was, that Maven uses the standard JDK as Java Environment to compile. So I toke the DominoProg/jvm folder and copied it to my build server. Then I changed the Java Home to my new jvm location. In the mean time, I had also done all the pom.xml files for the plugins. And then, the great moment happens:
Whats next….
- I will now make some documentation, how I’ve setup this also on my Jenkins Server
- I’ve to think, what should I do with the result of the build (assembly)
- Test the same with Notes Application (Martin Pradny has made some good progress)
- And learn how to test after the build 🙂 (The next annoying thing….)
guedebyte 