I am developing a (Groovy) application that I build via Gradle (on a Continuous Integration server). That application should be compiled into two versions: one development build (including some features I only want to enable for myself), and one public build (which would not include or just disable those "development features").
One solution to this would be to have something like a global flag directly in the main class of the application, something like static final boolean PUBLIC_RELEASE. Then within my code I could check for that flag and enable or disable a certain feature.
Now in my Gradle build script I could check for an environment variable (set by the Continuous Integration server). If that variable is set, then I could set (i.e. change) the current value of the flag to either true or false before the sources are being compiled.
I am sure that approach would work. However, it does not feel right to modify the sources themselves during the build process. On the other hand I would assume this is kind of a standard task for many software projects.
Is there any "best practice" to deal with this requirement?
Is can work out three way for handling the scenario - ordered in the way I would do that:
Create a dedicated properties file the is filtered during build and added to the final jar. Application behavior is determined by this file on runtime. Basically this is how such scenario is handled, but such file can be modified in jar directly by the user.
Source code filtering, hint ReplaceTokens. This seems the best way of securing the application, since the behavior is compiled into code directly, but also problematic when it comes to filtering.
Configure the behavior of application by passing system properties -D at runtime. There's a possibility that a lot of such properties should be passed so it might be problematic for the end user and the configuration of the application is explicitly exposed.
Related
Is there a command to build only the administration part of a specified plugin? Right now I am building the whole administration to build the public resources for the plugin, which of course takes more time. Since every plugin has it's own resources, shouldn't it be possible to do this?
Since Shopware 6.4.8.0 it seems to be possible to only build the extensions (not a single one, but at least only extensions) by adding the environment variable SHOPWARE_ADMIN_BUILD_ONLY_EXTENSIONS=1
There are no out-of-the-box scripts to selectively build only one module.
The build is based on one single webpack config in vendor/shopware/administration/Resources/app/administration which includes each extension's code as as submodule.
If you are asking to speed up development, you might want to use bin/watch-administration.sh which should only rebuild changed files when you save them.
One thing that I really like about behave ( https://behave.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ ) is that you can use the stage flag and it will run different step implementations for each one. If you pass the flag --stage=ui, then all step implementations inside ui_steps will run.
I don't want to be stuck with behave, but I didn't see this feature in other runner ( like cucumber.js or even cucumber for java)
Any ideia on how to implement this?
I believe this is possible in cucumberjs. You can pass the location of step deps for cucumber runner. If you have step definitions in separate folders for api and ui tests, you can change your configuration accordingly in your npm script or configuration of the automation tool being used.
You can have two sets of support code and specify which to use via the CLI with --require. Like many things this is easier to manage using profiles.
Aslak (the creator of Cucumber) has a good talk where he is doing something similar to this, using different support code against the same features and steps to test different parts of the stack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUclXYMDI94
We have a project, say coresystem which uses a number of in house dependent libraries, all at different versions.
The build configuration for coresystem is setup to reference libraries with specific version numbers for example coresytem 2.3.4 uses libraries abc-version-1.2.3 and def-version-3.4.5.
These libraries are often changed during at the same time as coresystem. And not necessarily the same set of libraries change with each version of coresystem.
How do we handle continuous delivery in this case. Currently we are constantly having to change the build config of coresystem.
Using variables as parameters that you can pass in to the build system instead of putting them into the config is going to give you what you would like to achieve here. Depending on the build system you are using there are different ways to pass in parameters like this.
For example Gitlab CI/CD uses this:
https://gitlab.com/help/ci/variables/README#custom-environment-variables
We have multiple test projects that access databases directly. Those tests basically validate our sql queries written in C# code. Unfortunately, they are not separated at the moment and are in the same assemblies that also house true, non-dependent Unit tests (I think those database tests are considered Integration test, correct me if I'm wrong).
Currently, we use 2 testsettings files (sqlserver.testsettings and oracle.testsettings) to deploy a different 'ConnectionStrings.config' file before running the tests. Each of them have connection strings specific to their test databases, that should be created before any tests are run. We do this because we want to test these database methods with both SqlServer and Oracle databases, since some of our clients use SqlServer while others use Oracle.
With this in mind, we have an 'app.config' file on the test projects that contains something along these lines:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
<connectionStrings configSource="ConnectionStrings.config"/>
</configuration>
I would like to know if there would be another way to do this without using the testsettings file, which is in this case already deprecated in favor of the new format used by 'runsettings' files. I can't find the equivalent custom-file-deployment feature on runsettings specifications though, and considered creating multiple build configurations using XML transformations over the ConnectionStrings.config or app.config files.
The problem with XML transforms is that it is currently not supported for these types of projects, and I had a very hard time with SlowCheetah when going to the build server, and ultimately decided against using it (I had this same configSource scenario on one of our Web Application projects and tried transforming the external config file. I ended up merging the file with the web.config and using the standard msdeploy transformation).
What would you recommend in this case? This must also be runnable on our build server. At the moment, we can specify the same tests to be run with both testsettings files there.
Ideally we would also like that SqlServer tests be the standard for all developers, and Oracle tests would only be selected to run on our build server. This does not work right now, since every developer needs to specifically select the sqlserver.testsettings file prior to running the tests the first time. With the build configuration idea this could be achieved, so I'm leaning towards that at the moment, but I would like to hear a potentially better approach to the problem.
I have a feeling we are doing something very wrong in this whole process (and this includes the ideas presented in this post) and that there should be a much easier and straightforward way of doing it.
I'm trying to set my application's version number based on the type of build (device/simulator or debug/release) so that I can sift crashes that are reported from developer builds out from crashes that I see on actual builds in the wild.
I'm doing this by using a Post-build Custom Command, which has the problem that it modifies the plist file after the app bundle is signed, resulting in an app that I can't deploy to an actual device.
It seems like if I did this as a Build step instead, it'd avoid that problem, but I fear that it might conflict with the plist merge step that I believe occurs somewhere in there.
Is there any correct way to do this?
You could try a prebuild step to modify the Info.plist in your project, before merging. It's hacky but there probably won't be a better way until we port MonoTouch to the xbuild engine, which is far more extensible - and there's no timeframe for that yet.