Friday, December 20, 2013

Maven and Jenkins for Continuous Delivery (release and deployment)

That is the agile lean goal, to deliver value at a constant pace with minimum manual intervention right?

I have written before about continuously releasing snapshots but in reality what you want to make sure is that once something is tested it can be deployed and that can only be achieved if what you have tested and verified is a release.

Here is how to use Maven and Jenkins to help the team with continuous releases of maven projects.

The proposal here is to use only 3 digits ( M.m.b meaning Major, minor and bug fixing ) for any release version number. We can continuously release increasing the minor version number keeping bug fixing number equal zero. Of course we want to leave the major version number unchangeable because most likely that would say something about the maturity of our platform. This is usually a version that has even commercial meaning so we better leave it as a configuration parameter which will be touched only rarely.

Maven

Developers work on a SNAPSHOT project. If the project has modules then you use Aggregation (or Multi-Module) How can we make sure such project and its modules are all released without human intervention? In other words how can use Maven to force a release version from a single command? The below command uses -DdryRun which you would remove in real life but it is handy to see what would the command do as we soon will learn:
mvn clean --batch-mode release:prepare -DdryRun=true -DautoVersionSubmodules=true -DreleaseVersion=2.3000.0 -DdevelopmentVersion=2.3001.0-SNAPSHOT
The above releases all releasable (meaning ending in -SNAPSHOT) modules tagging them with the same ${releaseVersion} and the root project as well. You can confirm that looking at all pom.xml.tag files that are locally generated for each project. It also (as expected) changes the version number for the projects so developers can continue working on new features for the provided ${developmentVersion}. You might wonder why I decided to increase by 1 the minor number for the next development SNAPSHOT version. The reason is I want to make sure the team understand the last number is reserved for patching an existing in production version. The next expected version will have the released minor version number plus one only if the CI server actually did no other release before as you soon will learn so most likely the next released version minor number will be higher than 3001 in reality.

You can try the above again and again with different combinations provided that you remove the tag, next, releaseBackup and release properties temporary files:
find ../ -name "pom.xml.*"|grep -v svn|xargs rm -f; \
find ../ -name "release.properties"|xargs rm -f

Jenkins

  1. Check "This build is parametrized". Define a String parameter called "MAJOR_VERSION_NUMBER" with default value equal your current release major version number. In our case this is just "2". Later on when building manually from Jenkins the parameter is pre-completed but definitely changeable.
  2. Configure the build to invoke maven with goals and options that apply to your specific case. Following our example:
    #!/bin/bash
    mvn clean --batch-mode release:prepare -DdryRun=true -DautoVersionSubmodules=true -DreleaseVersion=$MAJOR_VERSION_NUMBER.$BUILD_NUMBER.0 -DdevelopmentVersion=$MAJOR_VERSION_NUMBER.$(($BUILD_NUMBER+1)).0-SNAPSHOT
    
    The shebang here is important to make sure parameter expansion works. You can see how we add 1 as discussed before.
  3. I started configuring the build to invoke maven with goals and options that apply to your specific case. In our case go to "Perform Maven Release" and fill the boxes as in:
    Release Version: $MAJOR_VERSION_NUMBER.$BUILD_NUMBER.0
    Development version: $MAJOR_VERSION_NUMBER.$(($BUILD_NUMBER+1)).0-SNAPSHOT
    Dry run only?: check it to run just this as a POC
    
    However at the time of this writing the parameter expansion won't work in the spot above. You will need to use the literal maven command instead.

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