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Ask HN: How do you automate a build at your company?

2 points by simplegeek 9y ago

Greetings, So I am working for a small company whose source code is written in lot of Ruby, Python and Go. I noticed that their build process (i.e. building the project for the first time on a machine) isn't automated and you've to manually type in many commands e.g. installing lot of things using brew, adding things to bash_profile, installing node packages, cloning a couple of Git projects and etc. How would you go about automating this? Do you use any tools? Are there any good tools that I can use to automate this all?

stephenr 9y ago
I swear by Vagrant for development environments. With that as a base, any config tool can setup the environment, my preference is for shell scripts, or config packages if youre invested enough in a single platform (eg using debathena config-package-dev for debian environments)
- simplegeek 9y ago
  Thank you for your reply and insights, appreciate it. Before I'm able to convince the team on migrating to Vagrant, do you suggest shell scripts as a short term solution?
  - stephenr 9y ago
    If what youre doing now is running commands/placing files, then sure shell scripts can definitely be a quick win.
    - PaulHoule 9y ago
      If you use Vagrant you might wind up doing all the heavy lifting in shell scripts anyway.
      - stephenr 9y ago
        Its definitely an option, yep. Key is to think portable when writing them. Target /bin/sh not bash, don't asusme library paths, etc.
moondev 9y ago
Dockerfile in the repo. Vagrant is obsolete IMHO after they released a first class client for all platforms