BuildIt Libraries using Continuous Delivery

Following my previous post I’ve been wondering how hard it would be to setup continuous delivery for the BuildIt libraries (a small collection of libraries that help with things like state management and some nice additions to Xamarin Forms). We already have a build process and releases configured for each library so I figured it can’t be that difficult. I’ve been tracking what the team over at ReactiveUI are doing (see https://reactiveui.net/blog/2018/05/moving-towards-vsts-and-continuous-deployment) and as I mentioned previously I think their model can work well, assuming there are enough automated tests to validate quality. In the case of the BuildIt libraries, we have some tests but not enough that I would consider it full tested, nor to the point where I would be comfortable relying on tests to ensure quality.

With this in mind, I’ve made some changes to the process for BuildIt:

– We now have two main branches:

master – This tracks what has been released to nuget as a stable release.  All changes have to be PR’d into this branch and PRs can only be created by designated individuals. PRs also have to be approved and the VSTS build has to pass

develop – this is the default branch, and tracks what’s released to nuget as a beta release (ie x.x.x-beta). All changes have to be PR’d into this branch and PRs can be created by anyone. PRs have to be approved and the VSTS build has to pass

– The VSTS build is setup as continuous integration based on either master or develop branches

– Releases are setup in VSTS pushing only to nuget (I’m considering using myget at some point too)

Alpha – Build artefacts are packaged and deployed to myget as a beta release. This is setup as continuous delivery from all branches

Beta – Build artefacts are packaged and deployed to nuget as a beta release. This is setup as continuous delivery, but has a condition that limits it to builds from the develop branch

Stable – Build artefacts are packaged and deployed to nuget as a stable release. This is setup as continuous delivery, but has a condition that limits it to builds from the master branch

The important thing for me was that anyone can submit code to create a feature or fix a bug and raise a PR on develop. The only thing in the way of a new package being released that can be tested is an approval on the PR. Limiting PRs to master limits adds a little bit of friction and allows for a bit more quality control when releasing stable builds.

Having spent a bit of this morning configuring this, I was amazed that I could effectively complete the whole process of releasing a beta and stable release of the libraries from my phone (of course I had already committed the code changes to github from my desktop).

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