Get it covered

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 12:05:58 +0000

I really like CruiseControl.rb. Despite running my tests locally it has caught a few things that differed between my MacOSX laptop and our EY staging (and production) slices. Also it's a comfort to know that the tests are guaranteed to be run.

Following instructions i found at the Dead Programmer Society I was able to integrate rcov into the process so that I automatically get coverage reports with each test run available:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

That's pretty neat. Now there's two additional things I would like:

I want coverage run across the whole application, not split into "unit" and "functional" tests (even allowing for the arguments about rails use of these terms there is no reason to split running the tests in cc.rb) because otherwise I think the coverage of things like lib/ is going to be faulty. Either that or it shows up a faulty assertion in my testing practice.
I want CC.rb to automatically kick of a deployment to our staging server if the tests pass. Typically I check the tests run locally, commit, watch while CCMenu starts spinning then goes green again. Go back to iTerm and do a deployment to staging. Life would, I think, be simpler if CC.rb could kick off the last step for me.

There's two challenges to No.2 as I see it. The first is "How do I make CC.rb trigger a deployment?" and the second is "How do I make my deployment hands-off?" For example my current deployment requires a password to be entered to delete old versions. I can't see a way of doing passwordless sudo for that specific operation so I guess I'd have to remove that step from the deployment and then run it daily via cron or something.

Anyone else interested in this kind of thing? Or have a better process?

Curiouser and Curiouser! on cruise-control

Get it covered