In this series of posts, I talked about my continuing quest for the fully automated creation of a distribution for our product. I talked about downloading release notes from our issue tracker and how to add those to our NEWS file. Last time, I had the build automatically update some text files. Now, my journey comes to an end.
The final manual step in creating a distribution for our product, is about incorporating the latest version of the manual. Since our product is an extension of the Component Content Management System Docato, we naturally use Docato itfself for writing our manual. This means the source code to the manual is not in Subversion with the rest of the code, and is not easily available to the build system. So what to do?
Well, Docato is pretty versatile. One can have a publication’s output sent to a well-known location on a server, for example. From there, we can download it using Ant’ scp task:
<scp file="${remote.manual.html.files}"
todir="${local.manual.html.dir}"/>
where ${remote.manual.html.files} can use wildcards, like ${download.dir}/html/AMDS-CMS/*. But the download directory is on a different machine, so you need to provide the username and password for logging into that machine:
<property name="download.dir"
value="${username}:${password}@${host}:${remote.dir}"/>
Of course, having a username and password in an Ant build file is a security risk. But in this case, the build file is not available outside our firewall, so we’re good. Otherwise, you’d have to provide the user credentials on the command line when running the Ant target:
ant create-dist -Dusername=foo -Dpassword=bar
scp also allows you to rename a file when downloading:
<scp file="${remote.manual.pdf.file}"
localtofile="${local.manual.pdf.file}"/>
So now we can download the manual and incorporate it in our distribution. But how do we know we have the latest version of the manual?
Again, Docato comes to the rescue. It has the concept of scheduled tasks, actions that automatically run in the background from time to time. These are ideal for making backups, for instance.
So I created a scheduled task that builds a publication, and installed the task code on our manual server. Now every time a tech writer edits something, the edit will be automatically published at most a day later.
And so my journey ends.
But every end is a new beginning. Now that our distribution can be built by running a single Ant target, a whole new world opens up to us. My plan is to create a distribution automatically as part of our CruiseControl build. And then install it automatically, and run some tests against the installed version. Also, the distribution could be made available on some well-known server, so that interested people could always use the latest version for giving demos, for instance. But only when all the tests pass, of course Image may be NSFW.
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