Setting up your Continuous Integration environment - Part I

Continuous Integration is such a great idea: it works as a trainee that constantly downloads/builds/tests/deploys you application and notifies you whether something goes wrong or nice. I really do believe that (of course, besides several other advantages) it improves the project overall quality and also helps you to keep the application ready to be reviewed by a stakeholder.

If you are still skeptical about it, please take a look that this marvelous post here [Martin Fowler] .

Let´s discuss how you can set up a environment for a more complex project. So, unfortunately, this is tutorial for beginners (for basic/how-to-install-and-run instructions, check it on internet).

Introduction

The system consists of one server located in a external environment (for example, AWS services) and several mobile clients (iOS, Android and QT clients). Basically, the mobile applications fetch content/data from the server.

We need to constantly build/deploy the server and build all mobile clients. One very interesting point in this scenario is the amount of platforms: iOS (to build iOS client), Linux (to build Android/QT client - I´d rather use Linux for Android projects) and Windows (to build the server).

Besides svn checking-out + building + testing + deployment, we will also use QA solutions, such as Sonar and some static analysis tools for different platforms.

We will use Jenkins as CI server.

Proposed design


As I said, the system consists of several components: mobile clients (iOS, Qt and Android) and also servers. In this case, I´d rather use master-slave approach. You can create one slave for each mobile platform and also another one for for servers. To the given example, the solution is defined as it follows:

You might ask me why this is too complicated! But believe on me. If you have complex systems to build, this approach works a lot better: it´s easier to organize and to maintain, and each component on its own environment. In my next post, I describe how we set up all of this :-)