Compass Version 1.3

Creating a Regularly Scheduled Subversion Build Plan

This is the first part of a three part article on creating a perforce build plan. For this series of articles, we assume that we already have the following:

A Compass admin user called admin who is setting up the build plan
A Compass project called SVN Example.

The first step in setting up the build plan is to navigate to the build editor page, by first accessing the project details page of the SVN Example project and then clicking 'Create Build' button.

This will ask us for the name of the project and the files we want to save with every execution of the build plan. We will call our new build plan 'SVN Build Plan' and since we don't know if we want anything saved with each build yet, we will leave the 'Save File or Dir' box empty. After hitting 'OK' we are taken to the build editor page which looks like this:

The first thing we need to do is to add a build step to check out our project from the subversion repository. We click the 'Add Script' button and an empty build step is added to the build plan:

Now we fill in the Name, select 'SVN Argument Checkout' from the scripts drop down box. The SVN Argument Checkout script requires us to put the SVN server URL as an argument. We do this with: 'svn+ssh:// This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it /repos/ ./' as the argument. Notice that the URL ends with a '/' and we have appended a './' after that. This checks out the contents of the repos directory to the root directory but does not add the repos directory at the root directory. After setting these values our build step looks like this:

If we were to run our build plan now it would check out code from the repository and that's it. We need to add a build step to build our source code to make sure it builds correctly. Click the 'Add Script' Button again and fill in the second build step to use the Make script to build a makefile project using the makefile target 'ALL'. After adding this build step our build plan looks like this:

These are the only build steps we are adding at this point to our build plan. Our next step is to configure the build plan. In the configuration section we need to tell Compass that we want to save the bin and data directories that are in the root directory of the project. We add those to the file or dir to save and now the build configuration section looks like this:

The only thing left to do, is to schedule our build. To do this we click on the 'Schedule Build' button in the Scheduled Builds section. On the Date/Time tab, we schedule our build to execute on January 18th, 2009 at 10:00pm and then every day at the same time from then on. After setting this recurrence, the Schedule Build dialog looks like this:

After clicking 'OK' we decide that we want the build to run right now too, so we can test it. So we open the schedule new build dialog again, and this time we click on the 'Immediate' tab:

After clicking 'OK' we are done setting up and scheduling our build plan. The build editor page now looks like this: