In Search For A Better CI/CD

This is going to be an exciting time!

Imagine me, writing me first Clojure app!

I'm halfway through writing my first Clojure program called "relman", short for "Release Manager".

It's a simple CLI application to help me deploy specific WAR files to a dockerised Tomcat. 

The recipe here is a simple pull deployment (unless I've hit unforeseen issues - fingers crossed).

Firstly, I've configured my Jenkins build to rename any successful elwood-parent builds to <feature>-<issue number>-<issue description>-<#build number>.war and copy this to a mounted volume shared with Tomcat.

Secondly, running relman on host to copy the war file as ROOT to the designated Tomcat directory mounted as "/webapp".

Thirdly, umm.. I think that's it. Trying to keep the solution simple.

This POC worked by manually copying the file across directories, so technically this idea should work!

Furthermore, I think this recipe is universal and applicable when I use different Git branches whenever Jenkins kicks in.

As with relman in Clojure, this is a work in progress but I think I'm not far off from my end goal.

In summary, this is my first step to get CI/CD working and it's by no means an end to this exciting journey!

And the quest for CI/CD continues... (Clojure included)

How Do I Laugh At Thee? Let Me Count The Ways...

I hate to admit that I'm resource poor, in the sense that I can't afford to keep running my hardwares for 24x7. Neither can I afford to keep installing a new Linux image (JDK/Maven/Jenkins) every time I find a temporary shelter.

Currently, I have Jenkins/Linux running on an old machine. There were a few attempts to have it "VirtualBoxed" on my old laptop. However, since there is a sad fact about me and my laziness, all attempts ended in failure.

How do I laugh at thee? Let me count the ways

I laugh at thee from morning till noon till night

My soul rants which, when Jenkins s'out of sight

For constant installs take hours to days.

By nature, VirtualBox allows me to move the image between hardwares, but I need something much more than this. I need something that I could bring up on demand, something that I can move the data around, something that is lightweight - and Docker seems to fit the bill!

I was fortunate to have a hands-on experience with Docker at work, coincidentally, after playing around a bit with it in my spare time. At that time, I was looking for possible solutions for my quest on CI/CD. 

After spending roughly 2 months, I finally ended up getting Jenkins 1.6¹ and Redis images running on its own subnet with data directories mounted to host. I had to build my own Redis image as the official Docker image had a few issues when persisting to files. It could be something as easy as disabling persistence which I don't need, but nonetheless, time is ticking and I have to get back to Elwood development!

Below is a diagram of POC:

The proof of concept is very basic, something that's good enough to keep me going and something to iron out when I come back.

Hopefully, when the dust settles, I'll push these images into Docker Hub.

Repository: https://github.com/lyeung/lyeung-jenkins-ci-tools


¹Why am I using Jenkins as oppose to using Elwood for my build? Elwood is light years behind Jenkins and any mature products out there.

AngularJS 1.5 And PhantomJS Compatibility Issue

Last week, I've committed the relevant changes¹ to issue #508680² but Codeship³ reported a broken build. I swear I ran the UI test suite before committing and Grunt said everything was good! I decided to take some time to investigate this issue tonight to get to the very bottom of this. 

Broken builds keep me awake at night.

It appears that I've been building from the recent release of AngularJS 1.5 (previously 1.4) and there seems to be some incompatibility with PhantomJS 1.x. 

Interestingly, Codeship reported:

Error: [$injector:modulerr] Failed to instantiate module ng due to: TypeError: '' is not an object (evaluating 'Function.prototype.bind.apply')

After some lucky searching, this link came up:

https://github.com/angular/angular.js/issues/13794

The suggested fix was to move up to PhantomJS2 and update the karma-phantomjs-launcher module.

As to why the test suite worked on my machine but not Codeship's is a big mystery to me...

Note: Last October, as a true believer of CI, I've got Codeship to automatically build Elwood every time I push my changes to BitBucket. Codeship has been doing a great job for the past couple of months happily doing the builds in the cloud. (Hoping CD to come soon but everything must come in baby steps :)) It's an irony that I run a local copy of Elwood and manually trigger the build on Elwood sources. Does this sound like eating my own dog food?

¹https://bitbucket.org/lyeung/elwood-ui/commits/706cb2ef8025fc4fe46de2c7e18366f45107cfaf?at=master

²http://www.hostedredmine.com/issues/508680

³https://codeship.com - a cloud based Continuous Delivery platform and it comes with free tier.