Walking away from CloudBees Part 5 - Publishing and Fine-Tuning

Publishing private artefacts to a private Nexus repository

As per my new world order diagram, I decided to use my third and final free OpenShift node as a Nexus box, and what a great move that turned out to be. Without a doubt the easiest setup of a Nexus box I've ever experienced:

• Log in to OpenShift
• Click theAdd Application... button
• Scroll down to the Code Anything heading, and paste http://nexuscartridge-openshiftci.rhcloud.com/ into the URL textbox
• Click Next, nominate the URL for the box, and wait a few minutes

Wow. More detail (if you need it) from OpenShift.

Publishing open-source artefacts to a public repository

As all of my open-source efforts are now written in Scala with SBT as the build tool, it was a simple matter to add the bintray-sbt plugin to each of them, allowing publication to BinTray, or more specifically, The Millhouse Group's little corner of it.

The only trick here was SSHing into the Jenkins Build slave (one time) and adding an ${OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR}/.bintray/.credentials file so that an sbt publish would succeed.

Deployment of webapps to Heroku

As with most things open and/or free, someone has been here before - this blog post, together with the Heroku Jenkins Plugin README were a very good starting point for getting this all working.

In brief, the steps are:

• Install the Heroku and Git Publisher Jenkins plugins
• Grab your Heroku API key from your Account Settings page, and put it into Manage Jenkins -> Configure System -> Heroku -> API Key
• Grab the details of the Heroku remote from your .git/config in your local repo, or from the "Git URL" in the Info on your app's Settings page on Heroku.
• Set this up as an additional Git repo in your Jenkins build, and name it heroku. For safety, I like to name my other repo (i.e. the one holding the source that triggers builds) appropriately as well; it avoids confusion.
  • Actual example:
  • I name my source repo bitbucket
  • Thus my Branch Specifier is bitbucket/master
• Add a new Git Publisher Post-Build Action, that pushes to heroku/master when the build succeeds

Fine-tuning the OpenShift build setup

Having to do "Layer-8" timezone conversion when reading build logs is just annoying so put the slave node into your local time zone by navigating to (Manage Jenkins -> Manage Nodes -> Slave -> Configure icon -> Launch Method -> Advanced -> JVM Options) (phew!) and setting it to:

-Duser.home=${OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR} -Duser.timezone="Australia/Melbourne" -XX:MaxPermSize=1M -Xmx2M -Xss128k

(You might need to consult the list of Java timezone ids)

The final pieces of the puzzle were the configuring the "final destinations" of my private artifacts (my gets sent to BinTray courtesy of the bintray-sbt plugin). Details follow.

After that, a little bit of futzing around to get auto-triggered builds working from both GitHub and BitBucket, and I had everything back to normal, or possibly, even better - I now have unlimited app slots on Heroku versus four on CloudBees - and I'm somewhat insulated from outages of a single provider. Happy!