Build Tool Overview

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Build Tool Overview

The Build Tool is used to integrate your Assembla workspace to an arbitrary build or staging environment. This capability consists of these independent components:

  1. Assembla Build Tool
  2. Build Server (with Build Agent installed)

These components work together to deploy your application from its home in the Assembla repository, to a build or staging server.

The Build Tool

The Build Tool is a tab in your Assembla workspace, it can be added to and removed from Assembla workspaces like any other Assembla tool. The Build Tool integrates Assembla to your build server; it gives users an administration interface, publishes events to the Assembla Stream, and sends email alerts. The Build Tool initiates requests via a REST API to the Build Agent running on your build server.

In the Build Tool image below, on the lefthand “Configuration” section, you enter the hostname or IP address of your build server, choose a Build Frequency, and press “Update tool configuration”. After updating the configuration, deployments will be automatically scheduled based on your Build Frequency, and you may also initiate a manual deployment at any time by pressing “Deploy”. On the righthand “Build results” section, the results of the previous 10 deployments are available for review.

Note the following conventions that are in effect when deploying:

  1. If Build Frequency is “Manually”, the Build Tool will deploy even no new changes were committed.
  2. If Build Frequency is any value other than “Manually”, the Build Tool will skip the deployment if no new changes in repository were committed.
  3. If Build Frequency is “On Commit”, the Build Tool will wait for a specified period of time for new changes, if no changes were committed in meanwhile, run the build, otherwise wait again.

The Build Server

You must provide a build or staging server and install a Build Agent on it. See these instructions for setting up this server.

TheA Build Agent runs on your build server, and is a web application that listens for requests from the Build Tool, validates them, checks security rules, and executes your deploy.
We have provided example CGI scripts that implement a basic Build Agent. This Build Agent can be customized to your needs using the REST API. There are two primary actions that the Build Agent must handle:

  • Configure – to receive configuration parameters from the Build Tool
  • Deploy – to run the Deploy Script and post the results back to Assembla

We also can provide you our Assembla Build Agent.