nBuildKit release - V0.9.0
Version 0.9.0 of nBuildKit
has been released. The last release I talked about on this blog was 0.5.1.
Since then a lot more versions have been
released. The 0.9.0 release was supposed to be a stabilization release but there were many major
improvements which makes this a major change release.
The highlights are
- The settings describing artefacts, e.g. the nuspec and zip archive files to build, have moved to
a separate file
artefacts.settings.props. This allows each of the different stages, build, test and release, to easily use these settings without having to load configuration files from the other stages. - All user specific configuration files now have a version number which indicates for which version of nBuildKit they were created. This will allow nBuildKit to transform older configuration files prior to using them.
- The inline tasks have been moved to a .NET assembly. This simplifies the project includes that need to be made to get all the required tasks loaded. Additionally more complex tasks can be created and unit tests can be written and executed which should improve the quality of the tasks.
- User defined location and transformation of the configuration files prior to starting the build. In combination with the version numbers in the configuration files this allows nBuildKit to use configuration files from a previous version while still using the most recent version of nBuildKit. Note that it is currently not possible to upgrade the old (0.8.3 and prior) configurations to 0.9.0 this way.
- Build, test and deploy steps can define pre- and post-steps which are executed before and after the execution of the step. Additionally global pre- and post-steps can be defined which areo executed before and after each step. These pre- and post-steps can for instance be used to write information to a log file or to gather post step information.
- The build server specific code was moved into separate NuGet packages so that these can be pulled down on the build server only. Three different packages have been created for Jenkins, TFS2013 and TFS2015 / TFS2017.
- The layout of the scripts and NuGet packages has changed so that it is easier to create a new set of build tools based on nBuildKit. With this change it is now possible to create a build / test / deploy library that includes all or some of the nBuildKit capabilities while providing its own additional capabilities. An example is the ops-tools-build library which is being used in the infrastructure-as-code work I'm doing.
In addition to the major changes some additional build, test and deploy steps have also been defined:
- Complete a gitflow
stage, e.g. finishing the feature, hotfix or release branch, to verify that the pending merge will
not break the build. Additionally the results of the merge can be captured, by archiving the
.gitfolder, and can later be used in the deploy process to push the merge to a git remote. - Copying files from the file system or from a NuGet package.
- ILMerge one or more assemblies into a target assembly.
- Generating a targets file from an assembly containing MsBuild tasks.
- Invoking Wyam during the build process. Note that this is a late addition and hasn't been tested completely yet
- Invoking Pester during the test phase.
- Pushing files to a git branch during the deploy stage.
- Pushing an entire repository to a git remote during the deploy stage.
Finally the performance of the whole build process has been improved by changing how the template tokens are generated and loaded. The overall speed up for the nBuildKit build itself is about a factor two.
All the work items that have been closed for this release can be found on GitHub.