If you are using a CI, you might as well also use something like http://www.coveralls.io to get history and statistics on your source code's test coverage.
What is CI and why use it?
11–20 of 47 posts
Re: What is CI and why use it?
#12[deleted]
Re: What is CI and why use it?
#131. Is there an easy way of integrating an existing large ansible project with CI to use it for deployment?
2. With continuous deployment, how do you coordinate multiple repositories being changed all at once and potentially numerous migrations that need to be done beforehand? e.g. say you're changing the schema and the web API and all of its clients. Can you CI the entire system at once rather than one git repo at a time?
Re: What is CI and why use it?
#14Thanks for the article. I apologize in advance if this is a hijack, but I've really been trying to understand the craze of CI and feel this is a good place to hopefully get answers.
CI is something I have a constant struggle with. I primarily work in small teams and I tend to work with other developers that are diligent about running tests and know that "if the tests aren't green when I merge master into my topic branch, I don't push to master."
When I did work on a larger team, maybe CI was useful for the other programmers that weren't as diligent. Though, the CI box eventually got quite slow and you didn't get feedback until 15 minutes later (this was Jenkins) versus 2-3 minutes locally.
Unless I'm missing something, I guess when you distill CI down to what it does you get:
- Runs your test suite
- Lets you know if a failure happens
That's not a ton of value in my eyes, which is why I assume all of these hosted CI solutions are now also doing CD upon successful builds. You could also get CD without CI by using something like git hooks that kick off deploy scripts after certain events.
GitHub showing the status of your CI on the PR screen is cool, but while I do use GitHub, I mostly use GitHub as a code repository. The most I do in the web UI is clone repos and open pull requests. If you merge a branch into master that correlates to an open PR, GitHub automatically closes the PR for you.
I know we're in the era of "Automate ALL the things!" and I'm good about that, but typing `rake|make|etc` into my console isn't a huge pain point in my life right now. Is CI a luxury we've been brainwashed to love by the programming hegemony?
Someone please let me know what I'm missing.
Re: What is CI and why use it?
#15JP, author of the post here - let me know if you have any additions / questions! :)
I would like to have seen a section for when continuous integration is NOT needed, and would be overkill. For example, I have a solo project where my workflow is: make changes to code, run the test suite, fix any failures that come up, and then push to heroku. I tried CircleCI but I found that the only benefit it offered me was offloading the testing and deployment to another environment. In some ways it actually complicated my workflow, not simplified it.
Re: What is CI and why use it?
#16PSA: CodeShip just today announced free plans for up to 5 private repositories. Excellent and more than enough for most startups. Get started with CI -today- it's worth it. https://www.codeship.io/
Actually, they had that plan for a few months I think, they just added continuous deployment for their free offering a few days ago I think?
Re: What is CI and why use it?
#17If you are using a CI, you might as well also use something like http://www.coveralls.io to get history and statistics on your source code's test coverage.
I use it for my open source projects, but I personally think coverage % is not worth much for private projects. First, coverage doesn't mean well covered, it just means the code is being run. For new comers, it could be confusing and I find it more dangerous than anything to introduce that principle to beginners. My 2 cents :)
Nice service though!
Re: What is CI and why use it?
#18Thanks for the article. I apologize in advance if this is a hijack, but I've really been trying to understand the craze of CI and feel this is a good place to hopefully get answers. CI is something I have a constant struggle with. I primarily work in small teams and I tend to work with other developers that are diligent about running tests and know that "if the tests aren't green when I merge master into my topic bra…
"brainwashed to love by the programming hegemony" I don't know what this means but I think I love you.
Re: What is CI and why use it?
#19Thanks for the article. I apologize in advance if this is a hijack, but I've really been trying to understand the craze of CI and feel this is a good place to hopefully get answers. CI is something I have a constant struggle with. I primarily work in small teams and I tend to work with other developers that are diligent about running tests and know that "if the tests aren't green when I merge master into my topic bra…
CI means knowing that your product is always in a releasable state. Green tests is only one small piece of that.
I have an iOS app or two that I work on independently, as side projects. Even though I am the sole developer on these projects, CI saves me dozens or hundreds of hours of time. My CI script[0] downloads provisioning profiles from Apple's Developer Center, installs them, runs my tests, builds my app, archives the resulting IPA and .dSYM.zip to Amazon S3, uploads the build to Testflight, notifies my testers, then sends my iOS devices a push notification with an ultimate success or failure message.
And it does all of this every day at 4am, while I'm sleeping, and I don't have to think about it.
How much longer would all of this take if I were doing it manually each time? Time is the only infinitely valuable scarce resource. I don't want to spend time mucking with codesigning and provisioning profiles; I want to spend more time coding.
[0] I've open-sourced my iOS build script! https://github.com/splinesoft/SSBuild
Re: What is CI and why use it?
#201. Is there an easy way of integrating an existing large ansible project with CI to use it for deployment? 2. With continuous deployment, how do you coordinate multiple repositories being changed all at once and potentially numerous migrations that need to be done beforehand? e.g. say you're changing the schema and the web API and all of its clients. Can you CI the entire system at once rather than one git repo at a…
I think it's a hard question to answer as it could be so different depending on the project.
Ideally, your projects should be deployable independently from the other ones, to a certain extent. As an example, your API projects should get deployed, then the other ones using that API can be deployed later, be it a few minutes later or even days.
Hopefully I answer part of your question here?
For deployment, "it depends™" but you can certainly do whatever you need to do, always a matter of time and money! :) Your CI server could kick something on your servers. I encourage you to look at the hosted CIs and their documentation.