Bamboo, Grails and Git for Continuous Integration

TheKaptain — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 05:13:53 +0000

Following up on my recent installation of the Atlassian product suite at home, I had a really positive experience setting up Bamboo to work with several of my recent Grails projects. Bamboo has proven to be a powerful and essential tool at my day job and I’ve really been looking forward to putting it to work for my personal projects. I’ve also been using Git for a repository lately, and while I have nothing but praise for my good friend svn, I have to say the ability to set up a new repository in 2 seconds flat is pretty damn convenient.

Since neither Grails nor Git are by default supported by Bamboo, I grabbed a couple of plugins to enable my home continuous integration system. Bamboo has a very sensible plugin model that allows for adding new capabilites with only a jar file in the right place and a server restart, and a fairly rich library of plugins. It’s also encouraging to see a company that is committed to eating their own dog food – recently they’ve moved their plugin resources to Jira studio as you can see on the Grails plugin home page. This gives you as the consumer of the software access to the wiki’d documentation, any open issues, and even visibility into when source code changes are committed. I’m assuming that last is subject to whether or not the plugin source code is open source or not, but still – pretty nifty.

The Grails plugin instructions speak for themselves in the 3 screen-shots on the one and only wiki page. Anything else you need to know is summarized in a one liner on the “Builder” tab when you select the Grails builder: “Use a new line to seperate Grails commands.” Gotta love clear, simple instructions. Drop the plugin jar into $BAMBOO_INSTALL_DIR/webapp/WEB-INF/lib, restart Bamboo and configure a new builder for Grails. Took a couple of minutes and knowing where my Grails install was located.

A quick Google for “Bamboo git plugin” led to a bit of a hypertext chase that eventually ended up here. Looks like this particular plugin has passed through the hands of at least a couple of maintainers, but so far it’s worked exactly as advertised. And again, loving the dog food analogy, it’s nice to see a project enabling Git hosted on github. Thanks very much to Kristian Rosenvold for running with the ball on this one! Again, drop the jar into $BAMBOO_INSTALL_DIR/webapp/WEB-INF/lib and restart Bamboo. When creating a plan you will now have Git as a choice for a Source Repository. In my case I’m just using a plain file repository that resides on the build box, but it should work just as well with a remote repository.

Setting up the Grails targets is similarly straightforward. Thanks to this article, which describes the Grails setup on Hudson, and reminded me about the –non-interactive flag since obviously the build server isn’t going to be able to interact with the console. I’m also using a couple of Grails plugins to provide static source code analysis so my parameters also include -coverage and a call to the codenarc script.

I had a little trepidation about how this would all turn out after reading this blog post, but I’ve had much better results so far in my personal experience. It’s entirely possible that the key differentiator is wrapping Grails with Maven. It’s definitely not perfect, but it is getting better all the time. Hopefully you have better luck in the future Neil!

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Atlassian: Here Be Dragons

TheKaptain — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 18:16:12 +0000

I’ve been using Atlassian tools at work for a few years now, and it’s hard to imagine how much different developing software would be without them. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Atlassian, here’s the 10,000 foot view.

The Atlassian Toolbox

Jira is the cornerstone of the stack and, with the addition of the ‘Agile’ GreenHopper plugin, is an ideal tool for tying together issue tracking and project planning in one easy to work with bundle. Crucible and Fisheye provide peer review and repository browsing. The Confluence wiki provides a great framework for organizing and sharing knowledge. Bamboo is an extremely versatile continuous integration platform. Crowd provides SSO and identity management. And they all can link together nicely to provide consolidated views spanning the entire stack.

Here Be Dragons

Late in 2009 Atlassian started a new marketing campaign geared towards smaller deployments: $60 to purchase 10 user licenses for the entire software stack, including 30 day trial licenses with support. Previously some of the applications were available for personal use(2 or 3 Users only) at no cost, and indeed I have a Confluence install I’ve been using for the last year, but this deal makes the entire stack available at what is really a very reasonable price. And they even include a fun, if slightly corny, tutorial which guides you through installing and configuring all of the applications to link them together. So here’s my experience ‘Slaying the Dragon’.

The very first thing I discovered was that my years old Intel iMac with 1GB of memory just wasn’t going to cut it. The recommendation is for 2GB of memory and “No other applications running — just the operating system, JAVA, PostgreSQL and the Atlassian applications” so I of course took that as an opportunity to ask Santa for a memory upgrade.

Ten days later, with 4GB of brand new RAM installed I got much further than the SLOW grind that was Crowd + Jira + Confluence + iTunes fighting with each other over 1 gig of memory(shudder). Aside from a couple of minor hiccups, everything installed without hassle and the instructions were nothing short of spectacular. I did have to make some tweaks to the postgres database configuration upping the number of allowed connections; apparently this setup is more than a little connection hungry, tsk tsk. Crowd is the one application I’m least familiar with, and integrating with it seemed to be the most actual ‘work’ but hey – if manually copying around and modifying a couple of configuration files is the biggest hassle involved in providing SSO for 5 enterprise apps, I think I can live with it. I am probably going to have to bite the bullet and invest in a more practical server machine, but I’m pretty sure the 2010 budget can find room for at least one new computer.

Been There, Done That, Where’s my T-shirt?

I’ve already started to plan out milestones for the new year’s projects in Jira, so I guess I’m already committed to paying the $60 when my trial period expires. Especially when Atlassian is donating all proceeds to Room to Read. I get enterprise-ready software for cheap AND all the money goes to a good cause. Win-win in my books – and a great job by Atlassian(on both the software and the charitable good.) Did I mention they’re sending out free t-shirts to anyone who completes the challenge?

In the gallery below is a screen shot for the single Jira Dashboard view you end up with at the end of the exercise. It ties together activity from each of the applications into one homogeneous view, and each widget is color coded to represent where the data is being drawn from. If you’re looking for an affordable solution to help streamline your work at home or in a small development team, check it out!