VCDEP is designed to give instructors the ability to quickly and easily setup an automated continous delivery system that they can use in a Software Engineering course and engages students visually to teach continuous delivery concepts.
VCDEP offers orchestration of both PHP and Java projects through the continuous integration tool Jenkins. The main features of VCDEP are the following:
- Static Analysis
- Unit Testing
- Integration Testing
- and Automated Delivery to a Staging Environment
Prerequisites:
- Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 Server
- Docker (Installation Guide). You must also follow the post installation instruction which can be found here
- Docker Compose (Installation Guide). Make sure to select the Linux installation guide from the available list.
- Git
- SSH keys for GitHub. You can find the instructions for generating and setting up the SSH keys here. Once you have the keys, place them in the .ssh folder in the jenkins_server folder.
Steps:
git clone https://github.com/ncoop57/jenkins_server_setup.git
cd jenkins_server_setup
bash start.shOnce the start.sh script finishes and you see that the master container is fully up and running, navigate to http://<jenkins_ip_address>/securityRealm/firstUser to create the admin account.
Also the url for the webhook to start the Jenkins job is http://<jenkins_ip_address>/job/jenkins_pipeline/buildWithParameters?token=github-token.The initial webhook setup will automatically fire off a webhook with test data. This will cause the Jenkins job to fail, which is completely normal. Subsequent webhook posts will be successful since they contain the correct data format.
We have provided premade activities for both PHP and Java, which serve as a template for you to create your own and use. We believe these activities give a good visual aspect to the students since they can instantly see the changes they make once it passes all the tests.
The PHP project and activity assignment document can be found here And the Java project and activity assignment document can be found here
- Memory leak from successive stops and starts even when cleanup.sh script is ran. This is due to some of the volumes from the removed docker containers persist and they are located in a tough to script spot to remove so must be done manually until a fix is made. The usual folder you can find the volumes is in /var/lib/docker/volumes/. You will need to be root to access this folder in most cases. Do not remove the metadata.db file.
- The VCDEP server sometimes starts and tries to connect to the MongoDB container before it is fully running resulting in it crashing. Fixes have been attempted but it does not solve it 100% of the time. We suggest restarting the VCDEP server once the everything is up and running by navigating to the vcdep_server folder, opening the server.js file and resaving it. This causes nodemon to think a change has been remade and restart the server.
- Docker requires their containers to be lower case and unique, so we programmed docker to use the name of the repositories. We automatically downcase the repositories to lowercase for this reason, however, this also happens for the url addresses for staging and we noticed that students had difficulty finding their repositories for this reason because on github it shows as uppercase so they use that for the url and get a 404 not found. So, when you make the repositories, please use all lowercase names to avoid such confusion.