Continuous Integration (CI) with Gulp

A strongly opinionated way of structure your CI actions in order to both document and automate them.

The main purpose is to help writing down each action that the team perform as a part of the software development process.

Releasing a new version is the most common first action.

npm install ci-gulp --save

Defines a new action. name is a string (could be like "ReleaseNewVersion"), steps is an array of an array of task names (string) and mappers is an object defining arguments.

Defines a new task. name is a string (could be like "pom:version:bump"), manual is an array of manual instructions (string) and gulpTask is the automated task (optional).

Lets asume that sometimes we "ReleaseNewVersion", that means that some version field in a package.json (or pom.xml) needs to be updated. Then we use to publish to the community with npm publish (or mvn deploy).

The "ReleaseNewVersion" action definition:

const ciGulp = require('ci-gulp');

ciGulp.action('ReleaseNewVersion', [
    // Step 1
    ['package:min-version:bump'],
    // Step 2
    ['npm:publish']
]);

The "package:min-version:bump" task definition:

const ciGulp = require('ci-gulp');

ciGulp.task('package:min-version:bump', () => [
    'Please follow the next steps:',
    '1. Open package.json',
    '2. Update the version attribute'
]);

The "npm:publish" task definition:

const ciGulp = require('ci-gulp');

ciGulp.task('npm:publish', () => [
    'Please follow the next steps:',
    '1. Open a terminal',
    '2. Execute: npm publish'
]);

This will allow you to:

• Run gulp ReleaseNewVersion and follow the instructions in order to avoid jumping steps
• Run gulp ReleaseNewVersion.md and create a markdown document for humans.
• Run gulp ci-gulp:statistics and list the longer task to speed up your work.

With gulp-bump to bump package.json version attribute one task could be automated:

var gulp = require('gulp');
var bump = require('gulp-bump');
const ciGulp = require('ci-gulp');

ciGulp.task(
    'npm:publish',
    () => [
        'Please follow the next steps:',
        '1. Open a terminal',
        '2. Execute: npm publish'
    ],
    () => {
        gulp.src('./package.json')
            .pipe(bump())
            .pipe(gulp.dest('./'));
    }
);

Take a look in demo folder.

Create a folder with the following structure:

 + process
    |- actions
    |- tasks
    gulpfile.js
    package.json

File gulpfile.js:

// Module to require whole directories
const requireDir = require('require-dir');

requireDir('./tasks', {recurse: false});
requireDir('./actions', {recurse: false});

Folder action will keep the actions while folder tasks the tasks.

Manual instructions are mandatory to ci-gulp because you don't want to loose that knowledge. Also it will let you document each action.

Manual instructoins will be the fallback mechanism in case you couldn't automate a task. Statistics will help you identify the bests (longers) tasks to automate at first.

Manual instruction are optional anyway because you could define task using gulp as always.

Parameters are available to customize manual instruction.

File tasks/jira.js:

const ciGulp = require('ci-gulp');

ciGulp.task('jira:task:open', (args) => [
    'Please follow the next steps:',
    '1. Open jira',
    `2. Find task ${args.jiraTask}`,
    '3. Update task state to "Open"',
]);

ciGulp.task('jira:task:close', (args) => [
    'Please follow the next steps:',
    '1. Open jira',
    `2. Find task ${args.jiraTask}`,
    '3. Update task state to "Closed"',
    `4. Add comment: Please review ${args.featureBranch}`,
]);

In order to define values for the parameters needed, you need to set the action mappers.

File actions/feature-start.js:

const ciGulp = require('ci-gulp');

ciGulp.action('FeatureStart',
    [
        // Step 1: Checkout
        ['git:checkout:develop'],
        // Step 2: Open
        ['git:branch:feature', 'github-ticket:state:open'],
    ],
    { // mappers:

        // args.featureId will take the value from CLI parameter --feature-id
        featureId: 'feature-id',

        // args.codeFreezeBranch will be set as 
        //  "fb-" prefix plus ...
        //  CLI parameter --feature-id 
        codeFreezeBranch: (args) => `fb-${args.featureId}`
    }
);

Note: an CLI argument will be required --jiraTask ###