We have 4 environments dev, test qa, and prod. We do the following thing with FBS now, and I am trying to figure out how I might map in the best way to Continua.
Build
Unit Test
Stage (Copy to an area ready for deployment)
Deploy (Deployment is controlled through 4 variables representing each environment)
Each of these is a different Final Builder project that is wrapped by a single project, and run via an SVN Trigger.
After success of user testing, I manually promote a staged build to QA or Production, by running the last deploy script. This deploy script alters it's behavior if run interactively to prompt me for which build to deploy and which environment to go too.
Using Continua I want to be able to do something similar, but I want to do it all from the server.
I can't seem to wrap my head around the best way I might begin to start this. Any ideas?
What you’ve described sounds like the perfect use case for Continua, this is basically what we had in mind when we discussed stages.
I would begin by first trying to replicate the functionality of your ‘wrapper’ FinalBuilder project using the stages in Continua.
For example:
1) Create 4 stages (Build, Unit Test, Stage, Deploy) 2) In each stage just add FinalBuilder action which runs each of your projects. 3) On the ‘Stage’ stage, disable ‘Automatically promote to the next stage’, this will cause the build to finish, but gives you the option to promote it at a later date. This option is found in the ‘Stage Options’ dialog in the stage editor.
The only part which I’m not sure about is prompting at the last stage, currently we only support prompting at the start of the build. This can be setup on a per-configuration-variable basis, Configuration Wizard > Variables > Create/Edit Variable > Prompt Type.
Another current limitation is that we don’t register unit test results executed within FinalBuilder as metrics in Continua, this is something that will be added, most likely in the beta, but is still on our todo list. If you want to use the stage gate functionally to fail the unit test stage based on test metrics then you’ll need to use the unit test actions within Continua, or alternatively just fail the FinalBuilder project.
Hopefully this gets you started, as I said earlier, this scenario should be well supported by Continua, so if you have any ideas on how we could make it better in this regard, let us know.