I have an environmental build system which currently has the following environments:
- dev
- ci
- uat
- live
Just to be clear when I say environmental build I mean there are a set of properties files for each environment and during the build these properties are used to template project files, so a database server may be “localhost” on dev environment but “12.34.56.78” on CI. So when starting the build you can give it an environment property and it will build for something other than dev (which is the default environment).
Now the CI build works fine and spits out the artifacts correctly, however as the build is CI all of it is configured to work on that environment, and I am looking at being able to trigger a build for live or uat when a CI build succeeds. This would then run the same build but with a different build argument.
Now I noticed there are a few mechanisms for this, one seems to be doing an automatic trigger on complete which could trigger another build, but this seems to require 2 separate build configurations which are essentially identical other than the build argument being “environment=live” rather than “environment=ci”. Then there is adding another build step which would be the same as the first but take different argument and output the live artifacts elsewhere, but this would always happen much like the first option.
The final option I could see was to trigger a manual build once I have a live candidate, but it is unclear as to how to set a build argument, I could make a build parameter however it doesn’t seem to get pulled into the build script like a command like build argument would.
I will see if there is a better answer, but after writing this I found that using Build Parameters seems the best option, this then can be embedded within your build configuration anywhere using the %environment% (or %your_parameter_here%).
This can then be setup to create a form element for manual builds so you can easily create a build for a different environments.