Setting up my infrastructure - Part 4: Build server requirements

2013-02-28

Okay, after the short delay I want to continue with my pre-thoughts for the tooling evaluation for my pet project. I already mentioned my requirements for a task and bug tracking tool to coordinate my work and keep me on track.

Now the second important thing is to stay in control of my code I’m going to produce driven by those tasks. For that I want a good suite of unit- and integration tests. The next logical step is having the tests run at every checkin, so a CI / build server is required. This also automatically opens up the possibility to automatically deploy certain parts of my project to test, staging and eventually production environments. So this is something I totally want to go for.

My personal requirements for a CI / build server:

Work fine with .NET environments

I want to write something for .NET developers. As such, my pet project is a .NET project itself. I like to use the things that come in the same box as .NET (MSBuild, MSTest). Whatever tool I chose, it should support that out of its own box.
Work fine with Git

Okay, that probably is a no-brainer. Git is the new SVN (just talking about adoption here, please don’t kill me for that comparison), and I assume all tools out there will have Git support in some degree.
Can build branches automagically

That probably comes with ‘fine’ Git support. Whenever I create a new branch and push it to the repo the CI server builds from, this branch should build too automatically. This way I know for sure everything is working before merging stuff.
Easy to setup

I actually want to work on my project and don’t spend all my spare time with getting my infrastructure up and running.
Integrate with my bug tracker

As already mentioned in the previous post, a two-way integration of Ci server and task tracking would be extremely cool, but is not an absolute must-have.
Allow extensions with reports easily

I think about code coverage analysis, running FxCop and or StyleCop on the Buildserver and have their reports displayed directly with the build report. Not from the very beginning, but such things should be possible.

So, that’s pretty much it for the CI / build server.

The next post will bring some light in the darker areas of the infrastructure part, like where to host my Git repositories and what additional tooling may be nice when working with the code. This will also raise some questions about hosting in general as well as setup and tooling on the server, which may affect the tools that I’m going to evaluate.

Gingter Ale

Setting up my infrastructure - Part 4: Build server requirements

Continue with the next part, or see the other parts in this series