Over the past few years, Gradle has become a popular build tool in the JVM space. This is not surprising, considering the power and the features it brings, compared with its competitors. However, one thing Gradle lacks is history and the collective knowledge at the same level of other alternatives: how does one organize a Gradle project in an ‘idiomatic’ fashion? We feel that we’ve put together a decent build pipeline for each of our microservices over the years, and each one starts with their build.gradle file(s). We’d like to share it, although we’re not sure if it’s the ‘correct’ way. In this talk, we’ll walk through a sample project structure and build process. We’ll discuss the various checks and tools we use (e.g. Sonar, CodeNarc, Jenkins) at each step of the build. We’ll explain how each of the components in the process work for us, and share samples of our Groovy scripts. Most importantly, though, we’d like to hear what the audience are using in their builds!

1. Show and Tell:
Our Gradle Build
Steve Pember
Director of Engineering, Klaviyo
Gr8Conf US 2018
@svpember

4. A Long
Time
Ago…

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6. So.
Simple.

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• 1. Checkout from Github
• 2. build war

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Personally prefer Gradle over Maven
• DSL vs XML
• Task Graph vs sequential goals
• Incrementality
• Performance

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14. Ha ha!

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Agenda
• Musings on Builds
• Some background on the situation at ThirdChannel
• Responsibilities of Gradle
• Responsibilities of Jenkins
• Let’s look at some code
• What did I miss?

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Agenda
• Musings on Builds
• Some background on the situation at ThirdChannel
• Responsibilities of Gradle
• Responsibilities of Jenkins
• Let’s look at some code
• What did I miss?

19. Continuous Deployment is your
Ultimate Goal

21. Is a Venn
Diagram
Appropriate?

22. Continuous Integration:
Software -> Quality Checks -> Artifact

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25. Continuous Delivery ->
Reliable, Repeated Deploys

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Agenda
• Musings on Builds
• Some background on the situation at ThirdChannel

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Our Background
• Microservices

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Our Background
• Microservices
• Multi-Project builds

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Our Background
• Microservices
• Multi-Project builds
• Jenkins Continuous Integration Pipelines

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Our Background
• Microservices
• Multi-Project builds
• Jenkins Continuous Integration Pipelines
• No Real Story on Continuous Delivery

38. Be Afraid.

39. Well…
it works…

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Agenda
• Musings on Builds
• Some background on the situation at ThirdChannel
• Responsibilities of Gradle

41. Local Vs Remote Builds

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Local Vs Remote Builds
• Local: Fast, with some minimum level of acceptable testing
• Remote: thorough testing, with some minimal acceptable build time (15 min?)
• Your Gradle file will be more expressive than local needs
• Needs to support both Local and Remote in one build

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Parent vs Service Build File
• Parent: defines global config
• Parent: defines approved dependency versions, with excludes
• Service: local overrides

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Our (MY) Requirements:
• No building ‘final’ artifact from command line
• No deploying from command line
• Should act as guardrails for additional services and new engineers

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Quality Gate Checks

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Quality Gate Checks

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Quality Gate Checks

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Quality Gate Checks

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Agenda
• Musings on Builds
• Some background on the situation at ThirdChannel
• Responsibilities of Gradle
• Responsibilities of Jenkins

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Jenkins Responsibilities
• Repository of Build History
• Integration / Communication
• Build Planning & Execution
• Environment Setup and Isolation
• Build Reporting
• Artifact Production

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Agenda
• Musings on Builds
• Some background on the situation at ThirdChannel
• Responsibilities of Gradle
• Responsibilities of Jenkins
• Let’s look at some code

52. Walkthrough

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55. Remote

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Fail

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Fail

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Success

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Success

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2 Main Take-aways
1. Pater Build plugin: provides parent POM behavior to your projects
2. Isolated Integration Builds: quality gate checks on every push

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Agenda
• Musings on Builds
• Some background on the situation at ThirdChannel
• Responsibilities of Gradle
• Responsibilities of Jenkins
• Let’s look at some code
• What did I miss?

67. Anyone want to share?

68. Thank You!
@svpember

69. @svpember
Images
• Table Flip: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/170508-flipping-tables-%E2%95%AF%E2%96%A1%E2%95%AF%EF%B8%B5-
%E2%94%BB%E2%94%81%E2%94%BB
• Assembly Line: www.solidsmack.com/culture/humans-need-apply-new-short-film-explores-future-robots-manufacturing-automation/
• Poop Hieroglyphic: https://www.wired.com/story/history-of-poop-emoji/
• Civil War: http://nothingbutgeek.com/2016/05/captain-america-civil-war-story-featurette/
• Time Passing: https://themoodcatalogue.com/time-passes-by/o-time-passing-facebook/
• Golden Age / Athens: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:School-of-athens2.jpg
• No, No, No: https://giphy.com/gifs/no-arrested-development-what-11NBUrJDuMd5As
• Box of Shame: https://giphy.com/gifs/shame-for-box-of-eP1fobjusSbu
• Pinnacle of the mountain: https://www.outdoorproject.com/adventures/vermont/showshoeing/stowe-pinnacle
• Statler and Waldorf: https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/muppet/images/3/3d/TMS-Statler%26Waldorf-BalconyBox.jpg
• CD vs CD: https://puppet.com/blog/continuous-delivery-vs-continuous-deployment-what-s-diff
• Hexagonal Architecture: https://herbertograca.com/2017/09/14/ports-adapters-architecture/#what-is-an-adapter
• Canary deployments: http://electric-cloud.com/blog/2015/10/using-canary-releases-and-early-life-support-to-improve-production-releases/
• Sharing: http://business2government.com.au/marketing-to-government/shared-services-in-the-public-sector-lets-focus-on-service-delivery/
• Infinite loop: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/continuous-delivery/practical-continuous-deployment

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Links
• Parent Build example file: https://github.com/spember/gradle-parent-example