Continuous Integration: Executing the Build Locally
Local build is a unique feature of pulse that allows you to execute the pulse build engine in a local checkout of your project’s source code. Why would you want to do this? First of all, let me be clear that this is not a replacement for your regular build script (e.g. build.xml, Makefile): pulse is designed to be layered on top of an existing build system. There are three main use cases for local builds:
- Debugging your pulse file: the pulse file describes to pulse how to build your project. You can choose to either configure the build via the pulse web interface (great for simple projects where you don’t want to mess with text configuration) or by writing the file by hand. In the latter case you can also store the configuration in your SCM where it is versioned with your project source code. This is a powerful way to manage the configuration, but it suffers from a problem: when you need to modify the pulse file, you have a lengthy debug cycle. You need to make the edits, check the file in, trigger a build and wait for the pulse server to get back to you. This is painful, especially for debugging simple typos. Local build allows you to avoid the problem completely by enabling you to run the build in your local checkout of the project’s source code. Simple errors are caught immediately, and you can fine tune your changes to your heart’s content before committing them.
- Taking advantage of pulse’s post-processing model to make sense of your build output. Pulse uses post-processing as a simple but powerful way to extract useful information from a build. All build artifacts, including the output of build commands, may be processed using one of several built-in processors to find features (errors, warnings, test failures). You can even add your own post-processors based on regular expressions. By executing your build scripts via pulse local build, you get simple summaries of each command executed, with any useful features listed in the build result. There is no need to scan through line after line of build output: let pulse local build do it for you!
- Reproducing the build: imagine a continuous integration build fails in a mysterious way on your pulse server and you are having a hard time reproducing the failure. A key to reproduction is to execute everything exactly the same way as the pulse server. Although you should be able to reproduce almost exactly the same build as the pulse server using just your regular build scripts, local build allows you to go one better.
You can use local build even if you configure your project via the web interface (rather than writing the pulse file by hand): the pulse server generates a pulse file for every build and makes them available for download.
Pulse local build is available as a separate download to the pulse server package. Try it today: local build is free!
