Mike Nichols - Son Of Nun Technology : Builds

The Rake’s Progress – Part II

Michael Nichols — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 08:56:00 GMT

Some things I have loved so far about working with rake/ruby:

File enumeration
Blending regular expressions where it makes things more readable
Testability

After checking out lots of other rake files, it is easy to see how much simpler ruby can make things. Along the way I am picking up some idiom’s that (seem) more acceptable and concise.

File Selects

For example, I can do this:

Dir.glob(Path.join(“/path/to/my/files/**”,”*.dll”) + Dir.glob(Path.join(“/path/to/my/files/**”,”*.pdb”)

or better I can use rake’s FileList and a more concise File.join:

FileList.new(Path.join(“path”,”to”,”my”,”files”,”*.{dll,pdb,xml}”))

Directory Ops

I wanted to copy a file structure from one directory to another, but preserving the structure from the original. I had a hard time figuring out the ruby way of doing this, but this seems to do the trick:

FileList.new(File.join(WEB_DIR,"**","*.{spark,asax,aspx,ascx,ashx}"),
	File.join(WEB_DIR,"bin","*.{dll,pdb}"),
	File.join("#{BUILD_CONFIG_DIR}/**", "*")
	).each do |file|			
	path = File.join(DEPLOY_WEB_DIR,file.gsub(WEB_DIR,""))
	target = File.dirname(path)
	File.makedirs(target)			
	cp Pathname.new(file), Pathname.new(target)#bug in ruby for to_str invocation workaround
end

Configuration & Templating

I like the config.yaml RoR convention, so here’s what I came up with. First, two simple classes:

require 'yaml'
class Environment
	attr_accessor :development,:test,:production
	
	def [](name)
		if name.downcase=="development" then development
		elsif name.downcase=="test" then test
		elsif name.downcase=="production" then production
		end	
	end
end

class Configuration
	attr_accessor :service_path, :database_name, :connection_string, :log_level,:static_files_url  ,:dev  	
	# Support templating of member data.
    def get_binding				
		binding
    end
end

Plz…Ignore the crappy [] hack in Environment . These two classes will be read in by ERB like so:

desc "Expand templates"
task :expand => [:clean] do				
	config = YAML::load(File.open(File.join(CONFIG_DIR,"config.yaml")))			
	b = config[ENVIRONMENT].get_binding		
	FileList.new(File.join(CONFIG_DIR,"**","*.{template}"),File.join(INSTALLER_DIR,"**","*.{template}")).each do |file|
		path = ExpandTemplate.new().write(file,b)			
	end				
end

Here’s my config.yaml. Note how we map to the objects I defined above :

--- !ruby/object:Environment 
development: !ruby/object:Configuration    
    database_name: MaterialsTesting_Dev 
    connection_string: my_connection_string 
    log_level: DEBUG 
    static_files_url: http://static.local.com/MaterialsTesting 
test: !ruby/object:Configuration    
    database_name: MaterialsTesting_Test 
    connection_string: my_connection_string 
    log_level: DEBUG 
    static_files_url: http://static.local.com/MaterialsTesting 
production: !ruby/object:Configuration    
    database_name: MaterialsTesting 
    connection_string: my_connection_string 
    log_level: INFO 
    static_files_url: http://static.local.com/MaterialsTesting

Now we can use the ExpandTemplate call:

class ExpandTemplate		
	def write(file,b)							
		template = File.read(file)
		erb = ERB.new(template,0,"%<>")
		output_file_name = File.join(BUILD_DIR,file.gsub(".template",""))		
		output = File.open(output_file_name, 'w') do |file|
			file.puts erb.result(b) 			
		end	
		output_file_name
	end
	
end

So far this has been fun ripping out nant scripts and replacing them with rake.

The Rake’s Progress

Michael Nichols — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 05:40:00 GMT

I have been porting my builds from NAnt to Rake as their complexity has become unmanageable. I couldn’t recall the way I installed Ruby (and associated gems) on my Win 2K3 server and I came across a few issues that I had to resolve to get up and running. Here are some things that helped me.

iconv.dll errors

Running Ruby 1.8.7 required me to follow the steps here . This straightened out an error I was getting from Windows about iconv.dll.

Rake examples

There are a number of good rake (rakefile.rb) samples out there people have been kind enough to share. Here are the ones that were valuable in helping me:

Jon Fuller : He has a link to his googlecode repo of this file and accompanying utilities
Peter Mounce : He has a set of useful tasks for his rake dotnet project here which are definitely worth look at

Third Party Libraries Organization

Michael Nichols — Sat, 10 May 2008 04:46:57 GMT

I finally have my CI environment and am wondering what the heck took me so long to take time to get it set up. This has had me looking again at how I set my project folders up. Typically I am using the libraries from Castle/Nhib/Rhino stack and build them all at the same time quite frequently since the Rhino build process simply ROCKS. However I notice everyone putting all their dependencies in separate folders like this:

/lib/Castle
/lib/NHibernate
/lib/Rhino
/lib/...

Personally, I have just thrown all my dependencies in a single /lib folder and haven't come across issues with this. I still keep tools like mbunit or nant in a separate /tools directory.

My /lib directory isn't as pretty organized looking but like I said most of my dependencies are getting rebuilt at the same time anyways. So what advantage am I missing out on by just throwing everything into a single folder? It has made it much simpler for copying assemblies from other builds (I know I could automate that too). Am I being overly simplistic?