It suddenly occurred to me in the last week that I don’t really have a proper system in place for not only software downloads here on my website but appropriate build integration with the Source Control in building the projects as needed when commits are made. Having set up a Jenkins build environment for the software I work on for my Job, I thought it reasonable that I make the same demands of myself.

One big reason to do this, IMO, is that it can actually encourage me to create new projects. The idea of packaging up the result and making it more easily accessible or usable is often a demotivator I find for creating some new projects. Having an established “system” in place whereby I can make changes on github and have say, installer files “appear” properly on my website as needed can be a motivator- I don’t have to build the program, copy files, run installation scripts, etc. manually every time- I just need to configure it all once and it all “works” by itself.

To that end, I’ve setup Jenkins appropriately on one of my “backup” computers. It’s rather tame in it’s capabilities but it should get the job done, I think- only 4GB of RAM and an AMD 5350. I would use my QX6700 based system, but the AMD system uses far less power. I also considered having Jenkins straight-up on my main system but thought that could get in the way, and just be annoying. Besides- this gives that system a job to do.

With the implementation for work, there were so many projects interdependent and we pretty much always want “everything” that I just made it a single project which builds all at once. This way everything is properly up to date. The alternative was fiddling with 50+ different projects and figuring out the appropriate dependencies to build based on when other projects were updated and such- something of a mess. Not to mention it’s all in one  repository anyway which goes against that idea as well.

In the case of my personal projects on Github, They are already separate repositories. So I will simply have them built as separate projects, with jenkins itself understanding upstream/downstream, I can use that as needed.

I’ve successfully configured the new jenkins setup and it is now building BASeTris, a Tetris clone game I decided to write a while ago. It depends on BASeScores and Elementizer, so those two projects are in jenkins as well.

BASeTris’s final artifact is an installer.

But of course, that installer isn’t much good just sitting on my CI Server! However, I also don’t want to expose the CI Server as a “public” page- there are security considerations, even if I disregard upload bandwidth issues. To that end, I constructed a small program which uploads files using SSH to my website. It will run once a day and is given a directory. It will look in all the immediate subdirectories of that directory, get the most recent file, and upload it to a corresponding remote directory if it hasn’t already been uploaded. I configured BASeTris to copy it’s final artifact there into an appropriate folder.

Alternatively, it is possible to have each project configured to upload the artifacts via SSH as a post-build step. However, I opted to not do that because I would rather not a series of changes throughout the day result in a bunch of new uploads- those would consume space and not be particularly useful. Instead, I’ve opted to have all projects that I want to upload uploaded once a day and only if there have been changes. This should help reduce redundancy (and space usage) of those uploads.

My “plan” is to have a proper PHP script or something that can enumerate the folders and provide a better interface for downloads. If nothing else I would like each CI projects folder to have a "project_current.php” file which automatically sends the latest build- then I can simply link to that on blog download pages for each project and only update it to indicate new features or content.

As an example, http://bc-programming.com/downloads/CI/basetris/ is the location that will contain BASeTris version downloads.

There is still much work to do, however- the program(s) do have git hash metadata added to the project build, so they do have access to their git commit hash, but currently they do not actually present that information. I think it should for example be displayed in the title bar, alongside other build information such as build date, if possible. I’ve tried to come up with a good way to have the version auto-increment but I think I’ll just tweak that as the project(s) change.

Heck- the SSH Uploader utility seems like a good candidate for yet another project to add to github, if I can genericize it so it isn’t hard-coded for my site and purpose.

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