Monday, May 2, 2016

Taking contract for a field test with Jenkins and Dashing

I've been working on Contract for a while now, and I'm starting to get that feeling that things are going a little too well on the build front ...... I want to take the project for a field test and see what happens.

The plan
I've been wanting to build a Dashing dashboard for my contract Jenkins builds. And instead of using and out of the box dashboard, I'd develop one myself. So, here our build pipeline :


Our code needs to pass through 5 stages before we're happy with it. However, to alert us to a problem, we want our dashboard to be red for any failure per project.

The Requirements
  • I want a Dashing dashboard for my Jenkins builds.
  • I want to display one tile per group of jobs.
    • Groups should be defined in the dashboard config.
    • If any job in the group is red, the group is red.
    • If all are green, the group is green.

The rules
  • Once i've the contract set, I cant go back to Jenkins. I can only develop the dashboard against the ContractServer. 

The Implementation

Before I can start with the dashboard I need to write my contracts. I have no idea what Jenkins payloads look like or what URLS to get them on. After having a look around I've decided to go with this endpoint /job/contract_build/lastBuild/api/json where 'contract_build' is the name of the job. 



Contracts have been written, one for each of my 5 build jobs for Contract, and another one to prove that the failure case works too. Because my builds are absolutely never never ever red.


Dashing projects aren't maven based, As part of Contract 0.0.3, well be releasing a fat runnable jar for running servers from the command line. Running the jar looks like :



I'm off to develop the dashboard, wish me luck ..... My ability to misspell 'Contract' as 'Contact' knows no bounds. Dashboard didn't take long to write. I know neither ruby nor coffeescript, so I've got that going for me. With the dashboard completed, I've got something that looks like the image below. This is exactly what we expect, all jobs in the contract group are green, and the 'interceptor_build' job in the interceptor group is failing.


Lets plug the dashboard into our real Jenkins and see what clicks.


Perfect!! Our contract group stays green because all the jobs are actually green. The interceptor group turns orange because it doesn't exist on our real Jenkins server. I think this can definitely be marked as a successful field test.

Contract docs are here and contract source is here.
Contract 0.0.3 has just been released to maven central. The stars of this release are certainly the maven plugins and fat jar. And by stars, I mean the only thing in the release

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