CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2015/ch1a 6 TZ

Snap CI

Snap CI is a hosted continuous integration and continuous delivery service.

Background

Continuous integration (CI) is the practice of merging all developer working copies with a shared mainline several times a day. It was adopted as part of extreme programming (XP). The main aim of CI is to prevent integration problems, referred to as "integration hell" in early descriptions of XP.

CI was originally intended to be used in combination with automated unit tests written through the practices of test-driven development (TDD). Initially this was conceived of as running all unit tests in the developer's local environment and verifying they all passed before committing to the mainline. This helps avoid one developer's work in progress breaking another developer's copy.

Later elaborations of the concept introduced build servers, which automatically run the unit tests periodically or even after every commit and report the results to the developers. The use of build servers (not necessarily running unit tests) had already been practised by some teams outside the XP community. Nowadays, many organisations have adopted CI without adopting all of XP.

In addition to automated unit tests, organisations using CI typically use a build server to implement continuous processes of applying quality control in general — small pieces of effort, applied frequently. In addition to running the unit and integration tests, such processes run additional static and dynamic tests, measure and profile performance, extract and format documentation from the source code and facilitate manual QA processes. This continuous application of quality control aims to improve the quality of software, and to reduce the time taken to deliver it, by replacing the traditional practice of applying quality control after completing all development. This is very similar to the original idea of integrating more frequently to make integration easier, only applied to QA processes.

Example

Getting started on Snap CI.

■ Step1: Sign in

To sign up with Snap, visit Snap CI and click in the Sign in with Github link at the top. When you sign in, GitHub will ask if you want to give a set of permissions to Snap.

Snap CI website

■ Step2: Add your repository

Once you are signed in, Snap will present a list of all the repositories you have access to. You may only build repositories. If you are an administrator on any of those repositories, you may build that repository on Snap.

Your repository list

■ Step3: Config your build

When you select a repository to build on Snap, we will attempt to automatically detect some popular configurations for your build. We look for languages versions, build tools files, dependency managers and other conventions that may indicate how your build could be set up. In this guide we'll use a ruby repository, but we do support lots of other languages.

Configure your build

As most of the ruby repositories, this one uses a dependency manager tool call bundler and the rspec testing framework. Because of that, Snap automatically added the default command for each of them: bundle install --path ${SNAP_CACHE_DIR}/.bundle and rake spec respectively. Most of the times that would be everything needed to run your tests. However, there may be some tasks that are pre-requisites to it. In this specific build, we need to execute the command bundle exec foreman start &. It can be done simply by adding it before bundle exec rake spec.

■ Step4: Build

All that's left to do is click Build now and let Snap run our build.

Build passed

Compare different Continuous Intergration Tools

There are more than 30 continuous intergration tools designed to adapt to different platforms. I select several tools which can connect Github and relate to Ruby to compare.

Name	Platform	License	Windows Software build|builders	Java Software build|builders	builders	Notification	IDE System integration|Integration	Integration
CircleCI	Hosted	proprietary	unknown	unknown	Ruby, Python |Python, Node.js, PHP, Java |Java	Campfire, HipChat, CCtray	unknown	Heroku, GitHub
node.ci	Hosted	proprietary	unknown	unknown	Node.js	E-mail	unknown	AWS, GitHub, Bitbucket
Codeship	Hosted	proprietary	no	Maven	Go , Java , Node.js, PHP, Python , Ruby }}	E-mail, Flowdock, Grove, HipChat, Web	no	CloudControl, Engine Yard, GitHub, Heroku
Continua CI	Windows	proprietary	Rake, Visual Studio, Powershell	Ant	Execute Program(command line)	E-mail, XMPP	no	TFS, FogBugz, JIRA|Jira, NCover, Opencover, NUnit, DUnitX, jUnit, xUnit, NuGet, 7Zip
Drone.io	Hosted	Apache 2.0	unknown	Ant, Apache Maven|Maven 2, Gradle	C, C++, Dart |Dart, Go |Go, Node.js|NodeJS, Python |Python, PHP, Ruby |Ruby, Java |Java, Groovy |Groovy, Scala |Scala, Erlang |Erlang	E-mail	unknown	Heroku, Dotcloud, GitHub, Bitbucket
Integrity	Ruby	MIT	(command line)	(command line)	command line	Web	unknown	unknown
Koality	Private Cloud	proprietary	unknown	unknown	Shell Script, Command Line|Command-Line	Email, HipChat, GitHub	unknown	Amazon Web Services, GitHub
pyCI	Linux	GPL2	no	no	Command line	Command line	no	no
Semaphore	Hosted	proprietary	unknown	Maven 3	Rake, Command Line	Campfire, HipChat, Slack, Flowdock, Webhooks, Remote API	unknown	GitHub, Bitbucket, Heroku, Code Climate, Cloud 66
Shippable	Hosted	proprietary	MSBuild, NAnt	Ant, Apache Maven|Maven, Gradle	Ruby, Python |Python, Node.js, Java |Java, Scala |Scala, C Sharp |C Sharp, PHP |PHP, Go |Go	Campfire	no	GitHub, Bitbucket Heroku
Snap CI	Hosted	proprietary	no	Ant, Apache Maven|Maven, Gradle, Android (operating system)|Android	C, C++, Clojure, Erlang, Go, Groovy, Haskell, Java, Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Scala	E-Mail, Campfire, HipChat, Webhook	no	AWS
Solano CI	Private Cloud	proprietary	no	Ant, Apache Maven|Maven, Gradle	C, C++, Clojure, Go, Java, Javascript, Node.js, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Scala, Command Line	E-Mail, Campfire, HipChat, Flowdock, Slack, Webhook, CCMenu	no	AWS, Git (software)|Git, Mercurial
Strider	Node.js	freeBSD	no	no	C, C++, Clojure, Erlang, Go, Groovy, Haskell, Java, Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Scala	E-Mail	no	Git
Travis CI	Hosted	MIT	no	Apache Ant, Apache Maven, Gradle	C, C++, Clojure, Erlang, Go, Groovy, Haskell, Java, Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Scala	E-Mail, Campfire, HipChat, IRC, Slack	no	GitHub, Heroku

References

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