Step 5. Maintaining it
It’s imperative that every effort is made from this point onwards is make sure the build server never goes down, or gets into a state where it can’t make builds. Some members of your team will be relying on this to be the final say on if it’s okay to get latest changes, others will need its builds to see their content in game.
It’s inevitable that things will go wrong with your build server, no matter how much effort you put into making it bulletproof. Always be ready to investigate the build server for something going wrong if it says the build is broken and it works locally.
Where to from here?
So, by now you may have yourself a fully armed and operational build server, is that the end of things that can be added to it? … No.
There’s plenty of other great places you invest time to improve your development process as part of the build server. For example:
- Automated testing
- Setting up reporting emails to be sent when the build goes from working to failing
- Creating reports and storing data of crucial stats of each build. For instance, application size and memory low/mean/high water marks.
These things aren’t essential by any means but they certainly can help. If I set up any of them in the future, I’ll endeavour to write up an article like this one on how it’s done.
Until then, Happy building!
- Cratesmith.
Daniel Stephens
January 24, 2011 at 1:05 pm
Thanks for sharing. I have been thinking about setting a build server up for my own needs. I never really knew much about it beyond “It autobuilds.”
Tom L
April 10, 2011 at 10:17 pm
I had good luck setting up a CI server with Jenkins(used to be Hudson). With Unity it’s actually fairly easy to set up the auto build chain. What is not so easy, however, is to do automatic testing. There is SharpUnit of course, but the project seems pretty much abandoned. My best guess is to convert the XML-reporter that comes with the SharpUnit project to produce output that looks like NUnit or even JUnit stuff. Contact me if you’d like to further this discussion.
greetings,
Tom