Build Trust in Your Build to Deployment Flow!

A presentation by Yoav Landman of JFrog, the creator of Artifactory, on Continuous Integration (CI).

• Benefits of CI:
• Latest version
• no maintenance release, just do frequent releases including bugfixes
• less concern about backward compatibility
• Challenges of CI:
• Version tracking
• root cause analysis
• not everyone ready for this
• Devs have agile tools. So do Testers. But DevOps?
• All need access to versioning, tracabilty, access control, promotion, etc.
• Binary repositories (leave the source at the build stage):
• need Proxying
• need smart storage, e.g. find source when needed
• critical for CI & ALM
• Artifactory Pro has P2 virtual repo!
• Move binaries through phases, e.g. testing, staging, prod.
• Need traceabilty from version control system and build server
• Plugins for Hudson and Jenkins upload build info to Artifactory repository.
• Releasing:
• Your next build is RC
• Once built and tested, push a button.
• Version switch, move to another repo, tag
• Process: snapshots, declare one RC, release
• Release with Artifactory plugin - a little rigid but works on previously=built snapshot
• Redundant release build can fail.
• Should move snapshot, use binaries storage to promote, can script destination, etc.
• Need to update pom and rename snapshot to be promoted
• Done in Artifactory

We currently have problems using the maven-release-plugin with tycho. Artifactory removes that plugin's use, i.e. Maven does not release - Artifactory does. It renames and distributes snapshot and makes required POM changes in source. 

Artifactory seems to require artifacts.jar and contents.jar before exposing a virtual p2 repo... but isn't that a real p2 repo. It reportedly can't expose bundles in maven repos as bundles, which Nexus Pro says it can. I wonder though if we can generate an artifacts and metadata.jar for a maven repo in order to expose its bundle artifacts.