Novice Level

Creating Build Automation with Gradle

Pricing
1 hour
  • 3 Learning Objectives

About this Hands-on Lab

Build Automation is an important part of continuous integration, and a necessary component of many automated pipelines. Gradle is a powerful build automation tool. This learning activity will guide you through the process of implementing a basic gradle build. After completing this activity, you should have a working knowledge of the basics of build automation in gradle.

Learning Objectives

Successfully complete this lab by achieving the following learning objectives:

Your personal fork of the git repository is cloned to the cloud server

You need to clone your personal fork of the sample git repository to the cloud server. Make sure you perform the clone from your home directory.

You can do so like this:

 cd ~/
 git clone git@github.com:<your_username>/cicd-pipeline-train-schedule-gradle.git
You initialized the project as a gradle project

Once you have cloned the git repo to your home directory, cd into the repo directory and then initialize the gradle build.

 cd ~/cicd-pipeline-train-schedule-gradle
 ./gradlew init
Your gradle build generates a zip archive of the application in `dist/trainSchedule.zip`

The gradle build should generate an archive of the application in dist/trainSchedule.zip.

You can do this by adding a task to create this archive to build.gradle and ensuring the build task depends on it.

task zip(type: Zip) {
    from ('.') {
        include "*"
        include "bin/**"
        include "data/**"
        include "node_modules/**"
        include "public/**"
        include "routes/**"
        include "views/**"
    }
    destinationDir(file("dist"))
    baseName "trainSchedule"
}

build.dependsOn zip
zip.dependsOn npm_build

The full build.gradle file should look like this :

plugins {
 id "com.moowork.node" version "1.2.0" 
}

node {
 download = true
}

task build

task zip(type: Zip) {
    from ('.') {
        include "*"
        include "bin/**"
        include "data/**"
        include "node_modules/**"
        include "public/**"
        include "routes/**"
        include "views/**"
    }
    destinationDir(file("dist"))
    baseName "trainSchedule"
}

build.dependsOn zip
zip.dependsOn npm_build
build.dependsOn npm_build
npm_build.dependsOn npmInstall
npm_build.dependsOn npm_test
npm_test.dependsOn npmInstall

Then, execute the gradle build to generate the archive:

./gradlew build
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Additional Resources

In this scenario, developers have created the first prototype of the train-schedule app. They need you to create a Gradle build for it. The developers need this build to execute some automated tests that they have written. If the automated tests pass, the build needs to produce a packaged archive that includes the application code and its dependencies. The archive should be located in the project folder as dist/trainSchedule.zip.

In short, this automation needs to:

  • Have a build task that can be called to execute the entire build process
  • Execute some automated tests (the build should fail if any of the tests fail)
  • Package the code and its dependencies into a zip archive called dist/trainSchedule.zip

Prerequisites:

  • A GitHub.com account

In order to accomplish this, you will need to:

  • Configure git for ssh authentication with GitHub.com
  • Create a personal fork of the sample repository https://github.com/linuxacademy/cicd-pipeline-train-schedule-gradle
  • Clone your personal fork from GitHub
  • Initialize the project with gradle
  • Create a gradle build task
  • Include the com.moowork.node plugin in the gradle project
  • Execute automated tests as part of the build with the npm_test task
  • Create a task to generate a zip archive (dist/trainSchedule.zip) of the files that need to be deployed to production
  • Make sure task dependencies are set up so tasks execute in the correct order
  • Commit and push these changes to your GitHub fork

Some useful links:

  • Gradle wrapper documentation: https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/gradle_wrapper.html

What are Hands-on Labs

Hands-on Labs are real environments created by industry experts to help you learn. These environments help you gain knowledge and experience, practice without compromising your system, test without risk, destroy without fear, and let you learn from your mistakes. Hands-on Labs: practice your skills before delivering in the real world.

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