Category: Build Process

Using Docker Containers in Development with WebStorm: Next Iteration

We are always in pursue of improving our build and development infrastructures. Who isn’t?

At Softwareschneiderei, we have about five times as many projects than we have developers (without being overworked, by the way) and each of that comes with its own requirements, so it is important to be able to switch between different projects as easily as cloning a git repository, avoiding meticulous configuration of your development machines that might break on any change.

This is the main advantage of the development container (DevContainer) approach (with Docker being the major contestant at the moment), and last November, I tried to outline my then-current understanding of integrating such an approach with the JetBrains IDEs. E.g. for WebStorm, there is some kind of support for dockerized run configurations, but that does some weird stuff (see below), and JetBrains did not care enough yet to make that configurable, or at least to communicate the sense behind that.

Preparing our Dev Container

In our projects, we usually have at least two Docker build stages:

  • one to prepare the build platform (this will be used for the DevContainer)
  • one to execute the build itself (only this stage copies actual sources)

There might be more (e.g. for running the build in production, or for further dependencies), but the basic distinction above helps us to speed up the development process already. (Further reading: Docker cache management)

For one of our current React projects (in which I chose to try Vite in favor of the outdated Create-React-App, see also here), the Dockerfile might look like

# --------------------------------------------
FROM node:18-bullseye AS build-platform

WORKDIR /opt
COPY package.json .
COPY package-lock.json .

# see comment below
RUN npm install -g vite

RUN npm ci --ignore-scripts
WORKDIR /opt/project

# --------------------------------------------
FROM build-platform AS build-stage

RUN mkdir -p /build/result
COPY . .
CMD npm run build && mv dist /build/result/app

The “build platform” stage can then be used as our Dev Container, from the command line as (assuming, this Dockerfile resides inside your project directory where also src/ etc. are chilling)

docker build -t build-platform-image --target build-platform .
docker run --rm -v ${PWD}:/opt/project <command_for_starting_dev_server>

Some comments:

  • The RUN step to npm install -g vite is required for a Vite project because the our chosen base image node:18-bullseye does not know about the vite binaries. One could improve that by adding another step beforehand, only preparing a vite+node base image and taking advantage of Docker caching from then on.
  • We specifically have to take the WORKDIR /opt/project because our mission statement is to integrate the whole thing with WebStorm. If you are not interested in that, that path is for you to choose.

Now, if we are not working against any idiosyncrasies of an IDE, the preparation step “npm ci” gives us all our node dependencies in the current directory inside a node_modules/ folder. Because this blog post is going somewhere, already now we chose to place that node_modules in the parent folder of the actual WORKDIR. This will work because for lack of an own node_modules, node will find it above (this fact might change with future Node versions, but for now it holds true).

The Challenge with JetBrains

Now, the current JetBrains IDEs allow you to run your project with the node interpreter (containerized within the node-platform image) in the “Run/Debug Configurations” window via

“+” ➔ “npm” ➔ Node interpreter “Add…” ➔ “Add Remote” ➔ “Docker”

then choose the right image (e.g. build-platform-image:latest).

Now enters that strange IDE behaviour that is not really documented or changeable anywhere. If you run this configuration, your current project directory is going to be mounted in two places inside the container:

  • /opt/project
  • /tmp/<temporary UUID>

This mounting behaviour explains why we cannot install our node_modules dependencies inside the container in the /opt/project path – mounting external folders always override anything that might exist in the corresponding mount points, e.g. any /opt/project/node_modules will be overwritten by force.

As we cared about that by using the /opt parent folder for the node_modules installation, and we set the WORKDIR to be /opt/project one could think that now we can just call the development server (written as <command_for_starting_dev_server> above).

But we couldn’t!

For reasons that made us question our reality way longer than it made us happy, it turned out that the IDE somehow always chose the /tmp/<uuid> path as WORKDIR. We found no way of changing that. JetBrains doesn’t tell us anything about it. the “docker run -w / --workdir” parameter did not help. We really had to use that less-than-optimal hack to modify the package.json “scripts” options, by

 "scripts": {
    "dev": "vite serve",
    "dev-docker": "cd /opt/project && vite serve",
    ...
  },

The “dev” line was there already (if you use create-react-app or something else , this calls that something else accordingly). We added another script with an explicit “cd /opt/project“. One can then select that script in the new Run Configuration from above and now that really works.

We do not like this way because doing so, one couples a bad IDE behaviour with hard coded paths inside our source files – but at least we separate it enough from our other code that it doesn’t destroy anything – e.g. in principle, you could still run this thing with npm locally (after running “npm install” on your machine etc.)

Side note: Dealing with the “@esbuild/linux-x64” error

The internet has not widely adopteds Vite as a scaffolding / build tool for React projects yet and one of the problems on our way was a nasty error of the likes

Error: The package "esbuild-linux-64" could not be found, and is needed by esbuild

We found the best solution for that problem was to add the following to the package.json:

"optionalDependencies": {
    "@esbuild/linux-x64": "0.17.6"
}

… using the “optionalDependencies” rather than the other dependency entries because this way, we still allow the local installation on a Windows machine. If the dependency was not optional, npm install would just throw an wrong-OS-error.

(Note that as a rule, we do not like the default usage of SemVer ^ or ~ inside the package.json – we rather pin every dependency, and do our updates specifically when we know we are paying attention. That makes us less vulnerable to sudden npm-hacks or sneaky surprises in general.)

I hope, all this information might be useful to you. It took us a considerable amount of thought and research to come to this conclusion, so if you have any further tips or insights, I’d be glad to hear from you!

Packaging Java-Project as DEB-Packages

Providing native installation mechanisms and media of your software to your customers may be a large benefit for them. One way to do so is packaging for the target linux distributions your customers are running.

Packaging for Debian/Ubuntu is relatively hard, because there are many ways and rules how to do it. Some part of our software is written in Java and needs to be packaged as .deb-packages for Ubuntu.

The official way

There is an official guide on how to package java probjects for debian. While this may be suitable for libraries and programs that you want to publish to official repositories it is not a perfect fit for your custom project that you provide spefically to your customers because it is a lot of work, does not integrate well with your delivery pipeline and requires to provide packages for all of your dependencies as well.

The convenient way

Fortunately, there is a great plugin for ant and maven called jdeb. Essentially you include and configure the plugin in your pom.xml as with all the other build related stuff and execute the jdeb goal in your build pipeline and your are done. This results in a nice .deb-package that you can push to your customers’ repositories for their convenience.

A working configuration for Maven may look like this:

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <artifactId>jdeb</artifactId>
            <groupId>org.vafer</groupId>
            <version>1.8</version>
            <executions>
                <execution>
                    <phase>package</phase>
                    <goals>
                        <goal>jdeb</goal>
                    </goals>
                    <configuration>
                        <dataSet>
                            <data>
                                <src>${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName}-jar-with-dependencies.jar</src>
                                <type>file</type>
                                <mapper>
                                    <type>perm</type>
                                    <prefix>/usr/share/java</prefix>
                                </mapper>
                            </data>
                            <data>
                                <type>link</type>
                                <linkName>/usr/share/java/MyProjectExecutable</linkName>
                                <linkTarget>/usr/share/java/${project.build.finalName}-jar-with-dependencies.jar</linkTarget>
                                <symlink>true</symlink>
                            </data>
                            <data>
                                <src>${project.basedir}/src/deb/MyProjectStartScript</src>
                                <type>file</type>
                                <mapper>
                                    <type>perm</type>
                                    <prefix>/usr/bin</prefix>
                                    <filemode>755</filemode>
                                </mapper>
                            </data>
                        </dataSet>
                    </configuration>
                </execution>
            </executions>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

If you are using gradle as your build tool, the ospackage-plugin may be worth a look. I have not tried it personally, but it looks promising.

Wrapping it up

Packaging your software for your customers drastically improves the user experience for users and administrators. Doing it the official debian-way is not always the best or most efficient option. There are many plugins or extensions for common build systems to conveniently build native packages that may easier for many use-cases.

Keeping in touch with your pipeline Jenkins jobs

We are using continuous integration (CI) at the Softwareschneiderei for many years now. Our CI platform of choice is historically Jenkins which was called Hudson back in the day.

Things moved on since then and the integration with GitLab got a lot better with the advent of multibranch pipeline jobs. This kind of job allows you to automatically build branches and merge requests within the same job and keep the builds separate.

Another cool feature of Jenkins is the job configuration as code, defined in Jenkinsfile and used in pipeline jobs. That way it is easy to create and maintain a job configuration alongside your project’s source code inside your repository. No need anymore to click through pages of web UIs to configure your job. That way you also get the complete job configuration change history as additional benefits.

I prefer using scripted instead of declarative pipelines for Jenkinsfiles because they give me more control, freedom and power. But like always, this power and flexiblity comes at a price…

Sending out build notifications

In my case I wanted to always send out build notification regardless of the job result. This is quite easy if you have plugins like the Mattermost Notification Plugin or one of the mail plugins. Since our pipeline script consists of Groovy code this seems quite straightforward: Put the notification code into a try-finally-block:

node {
    try {
        stage ('Checkout and build') {
            checkout scm
			// Do something to build our project
		}
		// Maybe some additional stages like testing, code-analysis, packaging and deployment
    } finally {
        stage ('Notify') {
            mattermostSend "${env.JOB_NAME} - ${currentBuild.displayName} finished with Status [${currentBuild.currentResult}] (<${env.BUILD_URL}|Open>)"
        }
    }
}

Unfortunately, this pipeline script will always return SUCCESS as the build result! Even if someone aborts the job execution or a stage in the try-block fails…

Managing build status

So the seasoned programmer probably already knows the fix: Setting the build result in appropriate catch-blocks:

node {
    try {
        stage ('Checkout and build') {
            checkout scm
			// Do something to build our project
		}
		// Maybe some additional stages like testing, code-analysis, packaging and deployment
    } catch (Exception e) {
        if (e in org.jenkinsci.plugins.workflow.steps.FlowInterruptedException) {
            currentBuild.result = 'ABORTED'
        } else {
            echo "Exception: ${e.class}, message: ${e.message}"
            currentBuild.result = 'FAILURE'
        }
    } finally {
        stage ('Notify') {
            mattermostSend "${env.JOB_NAME} - ${currentBuild.displayName} finished with Status [${currentBuild.currentResult}] (<${env.BUILD_URL}|Open>)"
        }
    }
}

You can control the granularity and the exceptions thrown by your build steps at will and implement exactly the status reporting that you want. The available statuses are defined in hudson.model.Result, so feel free to realize your own build status management to best fit your project.

Using parameterized docker builds

Docker is a great addition to you DevOps toolbox. Sometimes you may want to build several similar images using the same Dockerfile. That’s where parameterized docker builds come in:

They provide the ability to provide configuration values at image build time. Do not confuse this with environment variables when running the container! We used parameterized builds for example to build images for creating distribution-specific packages of native libraries and executables.

Our use case

We needed to package some proprietary native programs for several linux distribution version, in our case openSuse Leap. Build ARGs allow us to use a single Dockerfile but build several images and run them to build the packages for each distribution version. This can be easily achieved using so-called multi-configuration jobs in  the jenkins continuous integration server. But let us take a look at the Dockerfile first:

ARG LEAP_VERSION=15.1
FROM opensuse/leap:$LEAP_VERSION
ARG LEAP_VERSION=15.1

# add our target repository
RUN zypper ar http://our-private-rpm-repository.company.org/repo/leap-$LEAP_VERSION/ COMPANY_REPO

# install some pre-requisites
RUN zypper -n --no-gpg-checks refresh && zypper -n install rpm-build gcc-c++

WORKDIR /buildroot

CMD rpmbuild --define "_topdir `pwd`" -bb packaging/project.spec

Notice the ARG instruction defines a parameter name and a default value. That allows us to configure the image at build time using the --build-arg command line flag. Now we can build a docker image for Leap 15.0 using a command like:

docker build -t project-build --build-arg LEAP_VERSION=15.0 -f docker/Dockerfile .

In our multi-configuration jobs we call docker build with the variable from the axis definition to build several images in one job using the same Dockerfile.

A gotcha

As you may have noticed we have put the same ARG instruction twice in the Dockerfile: once before the FROM instruction and another time after FROM. This is because the build args are cleared after each FROM instruction. So beware in multi-stage builds, too. For more information see the docker documentation and this discussion. This had cost us quite some time as it was not as clearly documented at the time.

Conclusion

Parameterized builds allow for easy configuration of your Docker images at image build time. This increases flexibility and reduces duplication like maintaining several almost identical Dockerfiles. For runtime container configuration provide environment variables  to the docker run command.

Clean deployment of .NET Core application

Microsofts .NET Core framework has rightfully earned its spot among cross-platform frameworks. We like to use it for example as a RESTful backend for our react frontends. If you are not burying your .NET Core application in a docker container without the need to configure/customize it you may feel agitated by its default deployment layout: All the dependencies live next to some JSON configuration files in one directory.

While this is ok if you do not need to look in there for a configuration file and change something you may like to clean it up and put the files into different folders. This can be achieved by customizing your MS build but it is all but straightforward!

Our goal

  1. Put all of our dependencies into a lib directory
  2. Put all of our configuration files int a configuration directory
  3. Remove unneeded files

The above should not require any interaction but be part of the regular build process.

The journey

We need to customize the MSBuild system to achieve our goal because the deps.json file must be rewritten to change the location of our dependencies. This is the hardest part! First we add the RoslynCodeTaskFactory as a package reference to our MSbuild in the csproj of our project. That we we can implement tasks using C#. We define two tasks that will help us in rewriting the deps.json:

<Project ToolsVersion="15.8" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <UsingTask TaskName="RegexReplaceFileText" TaskFactory="CodeTaskFactory" AssemblyFile="$(RoslynCodeTaskFactory)" Condition=" '$(RoslynCodeTaskFactory)' != '' ">
    <ParameterGroup>
      <InputFile ParameterType="System.String" Required="true" />
      <OutputFile ParameterType="System.String" Required="true" />
      <MatchExpression ParameterType="System.String" Required="true" />
      <ReplacementText ParameterType="System.String" Required="true" />
    </ParameterGroup>
    <Task>
      <Using Namespace="System" />
      <Using Namespace="System.IO" />
      <Using Namespace="System.Text.RegularExpressions" />
      <Code Type="Fragment" Language="cs">
        <![CDATA[ File.WriteAllText( OutputFile, Regex.Replace(File.ReadAllText(InputFile), MatchExpression, ReplacementText) ); ]]>
      </Code>
    </Task>
  </UsingTask>

  <UsingTask TaskName="RegexTrimFileText" TaskFactory="CodeTaskFactory" AssemblyFile="$(RoslynCodeTaskFactory)" Condition=" '$(RoslynCodeTaskFactory)' != '' ">
    <ParameterGroup>
      <InputFile ParameterType="System.String" Required="true" />
      <OutputFile ParameterType="System.String" Required="true" />
      <MatchExpression ParameterType="System.String" Required="true" />
    </ParameterGroup>
    <Task>
      <Using Namespace="System" />
      <Using Namespace="System.IO" />
      <Using Namespace="System.Text.RegularExpressions" />
      <Code Type="Fragment" Language="cs">
        <![CDATA[ File.WriteAllText( OutputFile, Regex.Replace(File.ReadAllText(InputFile), MatchExpression, "") ); ]]>
      </Code>
    </Task>
  </UsingTask>
</Project>

We put the tasks in a file called RegexReplace.targets file in the Build directory and import it in our csproj using <Import Project="Build/RegexReplace.targets" />.

Now we can just add a new target that is executed after the publish target to our main project csproj to move the assemblies around, rewrite the deps.json and remove unwanted files:

  <Target Name="PostPublishActions" AfterTargets="AfterPublish">
    <ItemGroup>
      <Libraries Include="$(PublishUrl)\*.dll" Exclude="$(PublishUrl)\MyProject.dll" />
    </ItemGroup>
    <ItemGroup>
      <Unwanted Include="$(PublishUrl)\MyProject.pdb;$(PublishUrl)\.filenesting.json" />
    </ItemGroup>
    <Move SourceFiles="@(Libraries)" DestinationFolder="$(PublishUrl)/lib" />
    <Copy SourceFiles="Build\MyProject.runtimeconfig.json;Build\web.config" DestinationFiles="$(PublishUrl)\MyProject.runtimeconfig.json;$(PublishUrl)\web.config" />
    <Delete Files="@(Libraries)" />
    <Delete Files="@(Unwanted)" />
    <RemoveDir Directories="$(PublishUrl)\Build" />
    <RegexTrimFileText InputFile="$(PublishUrl)\MyProject.deps.json" OutputFile="$(PublishUrl)\MyProject.deps.json" MatchExpression="(?&lt;=&quot;).*[/|\\](?=.*\.dll|.*\.exe)" />
    <RegexReplaceFileText InputFile="$(PublishUrl)\MyProject.deps.json" OutputFile="$(PublishUrl)\MyProject.deps.json" MatchExpression="&quot;path&quot;: &quot;.*&quot;" ReplacementText="&quot;path&quot;: &quot;.&quot;" />
  </Target>

The result

All this work should result in a working application with a root directory layout like in the image. As far as we know the remaining files like the web.config, the main project assembly and the two json files cannot easily relocated. The resulting layout is nevertheless quite clean and makes it easy for administrators to find the configuration files they need to customize.

Of course one can argue if the result is worth the hassle but if your customers’ administrators and operations value it you should do it.

Automated vulnerability checking of software dependencies

The OWASP organization is focused on improving the security of software systems and regularly publishes lists with security risks, such as the OWASP Top 10 Most Critical Web Application Security Risks or the Mobile Top 10 Security Risks. Among these are common attack vectors like command injections, buffer overruns, stack buffer overflow attacks and SQL injections.

When developing software you have to be aware of these in order to avoid and prevent them. If your project depends on third-party software components, such as open source libraries, you have to assess those dependencies for security risks as well. It is not enough to do this just once. You have to check them regularly and watch for any known, publicly disclosed, vulnerabilities in these dependencies.

Publicly known information-security vulnerabilities are tracked according to the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) standard. Each vulnerability is assigned an ID, for example CVE-2009-2704, and published in the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) by the U.S. government. Here’s an example for such an entry.

Automated Dependency Checking

There are tools and services to automatically check the dependencies of your project against these publicly known vulnerabilities, for example the OWASP Dependency Check or the Sonatype OSS Index. In order to use them your project has to use a dependency manager, for example Maven in the Java world or NuGet in the .NET ecosystem.

Here’s how to integrate the OWASP Dependency Check into your Maven based project, by adding the following plugin to the pom.xml file:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.owasp</groupId>
  <artifactId>dependency-check-maven</artifactId>
  <version>5.0.0-M1</version>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <goals>
        <goal>check</goal>
      </goals>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>

When you run the Maven goal dependency-check:check you might see an output like this:

One or more dependencies were identified with known vulnerabilities in Project XYZ:

jboss-j2eemgmt-api_1.1_spec-1.0.1.Final.jar (pkg:maven/org.jboss.spec.javax.management.j2ee/jboss-j2eemgmt-api_1.1_spec@1.0.1.Final, cpe:2.3:a:sun:j2ee:1.0.1:*:*:*:*:*:*:*) : CVE-2009-2704, CVE-2009-2705
...

The output tells you which version of a dependency is affected and the CVE ID. Now you can use this ID to look it up in the NVD database and inform yourself about the potential dangers of the vulnerability and take action, like updating the dependency if there is a newer version, which addresses the vulnerability.

3 rules for projects under version control

Checking out a project under version control should be easy and repeatable. Here are a few tips on how to achieve that:

1. Self-containment

You should not need a specifically configured machine to start working on a project. Ideally, you clone the project and get started. Many things can be a problem to achieve that.
Maybe your project is needs a specific operating system, dependency installed, hardware or database setup to run. I personally draw that line at this:
You get a manual with the code that helps you to set up your development environment once and this should be as automated & easy as possible. You should always be able to run your projects without periphery, i.e. specific hardware that can be plugged in or databases that need to be installed.
To achieve this for hardware, you can often fake it via polymorphic interfaces and dependency injection, much like mocking it for testing. The same can be done with databases – or you can use in-memory databases as a fallback.

2. Separate build-artifacts

Building the project into an executable form should be clearly separated from the source-controlled files. For example, the build should never ever modify a file that is under version control. Ideally, the “build” directory is completely independent from the source – enabling a true out-of-source build. However, it is often a good middle ground to allow building in a few dedicated directories in your source repository – but these need to be in .gitignore.

3. Separate runtime data

In the same way, running your project should not touch any source controlled files. Ideally, the project can be run out-of-source. This is trivial for small programs that do not have data, but once some data needs to be managed by the source control system, it gets a little more tricky for the executables to find the data. For data that needs to be changed by the program (we call these “stores”), it is advisable to maintain templates in the VCS or in codes, and copy them to the runtime directory during the build process. For data that is not changed by running the program, such as images, videos, translation-tables etc., you can copy them as well, or make sure the program finds them in the source repository.

Following these guidelines will make it easier to work with version control, especially when multiple people are involved.

Ansible in Jenkins

Ansible is a powerful tool for automation of your IT infrastructure. In contrast to chef or puppet it does not need much infrastructure like a server and client (“agent”) programs on your target machines. We like to use it for keeping our servers and desktop machines up-to-date and provisioned in a defined, repeatable and self-documented way.

As of late ansible has begun to replace our different, custom-made – but already automated – deployment processes we implemented using different tools like ant scripts run by jenkins-jobs. The natural way of using ansible for deployment in our current infrastructure would be using it from jenkins with the jenkins ansible plugin.

Even though the plugin supports the “Global Tool Configuration” mechanism and automatic management of several ansible installations it did not work out of the box for us:

At first, the executable path was not set correctly. We managed to fix that but then the next problem arose: Our standard build slaves had no jinja2 (python templating library) installed. Sure, that are problems you can easily fix if you decide so.

For us, it was too much tinkering and snowflaking our build slaves to be feasible and we took another route, that you can consider: Running ansible from an docker image.

We already have a host for running docker containers attached to jenkins so our current state of deployment with ansible roughly consists of a Dockerfile and a Jenkins job to run the container.

The Dockerfile is as simple as


FROM ubuntu:14.04
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get update && apt-get -y dist-upgrade && apt-get -y install software-properties-common
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible-2.4
RUN DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get update && apt-get -y install ansible

# Setup work dir
WORKDIR /project/provisioning

# Copy project directory into container
COPY . /project

# Deploy the project
CMD ansible-playbook -i inventory deploy-project.yml

And the jenkins build step to actually run the deployment looks like


docker build -t project-deploy .
docker run project-deploy

That way we can tailor our deployment machine to conveniently run our ansible playbooks for the specific project without modifying our normal build slave setups and adding complexity on their side. All the tinkering with the jenkins ansible plugin is unnecessary going this way and relying on docker and what the container provides for running ansible.

Integrating .NET projects with Gradle

Recently I have created Gradle build scripts for several .NET projects, bot C# and VB.NET projects. Projects for the .NET platform are usually built with MSBuild, which is part of the .NET Framework distribution and itself a full-blown build automation tool: you can define build targets, their dependencies and execute tasks to reach the build targets. I have written about the basics of MSBuild in a previous blog post.

The .NET projects I was working on were using MSBuild targets for the various build stages as well. Not only for building and testing, but also for the release and deployment scripts. These scripts were called from our Jenkins CI with the MSBuild Jenkins Plugin.

Gradle plugins

However, I wasn’t very happy with MSBuild’s clunky Ant-like XML based syntax, and for most of our other projects we are using Gradle nowadays. So I tried Gradle for a new .NET project. I am using the Gradle MSBuild and Gradle NUnit plugins. Of course, the MSBuild Gradle plugin is calling MSBuild, so I don’t get rid of MSBuild completely, because Visual Studio’s .csproj and .vbproj project files are essentially MSBuild scripts, and I don’t want to get rid of them. So there is one Gradle task which to calls MSBuild, but everything else beyond the act of compilation is automated with regular Gradle tasks, like copying files, zipping release artifacts etc.

Basic usage of the MSBuild plugin looks like this:

plugins {
  id "com.ullink.msbuild" version "2.18"
}

msbuild {
  // either a solution file
  solutionFile = 'DemoSolution.sln'
  // or a project file (.csproj or .vbproj)
  projectFile = file('src/DemoSoProject.csproj')

  targets = ['Clean', 'Rebuild']

  destinationDir = 'build/msbuild/bin'
}

The plugin offers lots of additional options, be sure to check out the documentation on Github. If you want to give the MSBuild step its own task name, which is currently not directly mentioned on the Github page, use the task type Msbuild from the package com.ullink:

import com.ullink.Msbuild

// ...

task buildSolution(type: 'Msbuild', dependsOn: '...') {
  // ...
}

Since the .NET projects I’m working on use NUnit for unit testing, I’m using the NUnit Gradle plugin by the same creator as well. Again, please consult the documentation on the Github page for all available options. What I found necessary was setting the nunitHome option, because I don’t want the plugin to download a NUnit release from the internet, but use the one that is included with our project. Also, if you want a task with its own name or multiple testing tasks, use the NUnit task type in the package com.ullink.gradle.nunit:

import com.ullink.gradle.nunit.NUnit

// ...

task test(type: 'NUnit', dependsOn: 'buildSolution') {
  nunitVersion = '3.8.0'
  nunitHome = "${project.projectDir}/packages/NUnit.ConsoleRunner.3.8.0/tools"
  testAssemblies = ["${project.projectDir}/MyProject.Tests/bin/Release/MyProject.Tests.dll"]
}
test.dependsOn.remove(msbuild)

With Gradle I am now able to share common build tasks, for example for our release process, with our other non .NET projects, which use Gradle as well.

Analyzing gradle projects using SonarQube without gradle plugin

SonarQube makes static code analysis easy for a plethora of languages and environments. In many of our newer projects we use gradle as our buildsystem and jenkins as our continuous integration server. Integrating sonarqube in such a setup can be done in a couple of ways, the most straightforward being

  • Integrating SonarQube into your gradle build and invoke the gradle script in jenkins
  • Letting jenkins invoke the gradle build and execute the SonarQube scanner

I chose the latter one because I did not want to add further dependencies to the build process.

Configuration of the SonarQube scanner

The SonarQube scanner must be configured by property file called sonar-project.properties by default:

# must be unique in a given SonarQube instance
sonar.projectKey=domain:project
# this is the name and version displayed in the SonarQube UI. Was mandatory prior to SonarQube 6.1.
sonar.projectName=My cool project
sonar.projectVersion=23

sonar.sources=src/main/java
sonar.tests=src/test/java
sonar.java.binaries=build/classes/java/main
sonar.java.libraries=../lib/**/*.jar
sonar.java.test.libraries=../lib/**/*.jar
sonar.junit.reportPaths=build/test-results/test/
sonar.jacoco.reportPaths=build/jacoco/test.exec

sonar.modules=application,my_library,my_tools

# Encoding of the source code. Default is default system encoding
sonar.sourceEncoding=UTF-8
sonar.java.source=1.8

sonar.links.ci=http://${my_jenkins}/view/job/MyCoolProject
sonar.links.issue=http://${my_jira}/browse/MYPROJ

After we have done that we can submit our project to the SonarQube scanner using the jenkins SonarQube plugin and its “Execute SonarQube Scanner” build step.

Optional: Adding code coverage to our build

Even our gradle-based projects aim to be self-contained. That means we usually do not use repositories like mavenCentral for our dependencies but store them all in a lib directory along the project. If we want to add code coverage to such a project we need to add jacoco in the version corresponding to the jacoco-gradle-plugin to our libs in build.gradle:

allprojects {
    apply plugin: 'java'
    apply plugin: 'jacoco'
    sourceCompatibility = 1.8

    jacocoTestReport {
        reports {
            xml.enabled true
        }
        jacocoClasspath = files('../lib/org.jacoco.core-0.7.9.jar',
            '../lib/org.jacoco.report-0.7.9.jar',
            '../lib/org.jacoco.ant-0.7.9.jar',
            '../lib/asm-all-5.2.jar'
        )
    }
}

Gotchas

Our jenkins build job consists of 2 steps:

  1. Execute gradle
  2. Submit project to SonarQube’s scanner

By default gradle stops execution on failure. That means later tasks like jacocoTestReport are not executed if a test fails. We need to invoke gradle with the --continue switch to always run all of our tasks.