re: Subversion Best Practices for Web Applications

Nick Parker — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 20:32:39 GMT

CruiseControl builds the binaries using msbuild - binaries that aren't built from the project are checked in.

re: Subversion Best Practices for Web Applications

Kyle — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:27:08 GMT

Nice! I really like how you are using CruiseControl to automate everything.

One question: How do you handle binaries? Do you check them in, rely on CruiseControl to build them, have CruiseControl check them in, other?

re: Subversion Best Practices for Web Applications

Nick Parker — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:47:53 GMT

Kyle,

Thanks for the great post ideas that have lef to our current build process. Below is what we're now using:

We have our trunk, and two branches - test and staging.

Developers regularly check into trunk, which fires off an automatic build of our development site using CruiseControl.net (confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/.../Welcome+to+CruiseControl.NET). From there I can automatically merge all changes from trunk into the test branch, which fires off an automated build of our test site, or I can manually merge changes into the test branch and force a build of the test site (this is used for patches). When that's been tested and is ready for primetime, CruiseControl automatically controls the merge into the staging branch, which builds our staging site in the production environment. From there, we use vice-versa to only update / add / delete new or changed files to production.

So the most common steps to push a new release are:

1.) Force cc to merge trunk into test branch

2.) Test everything on test

3.) Force cc to merge test into staging branch, tag revision

4.) Final testing on staging (in production environment)

5.) Vice versa between staging and production

The nice thing there is that we have a few loadbalanced servers, and vice-versa can update whichever servers we want all at the same time, and also will remove files that are no longer in use.

Nick