Tell me more ×
Salesforce Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Salesforce administrators, implementation experts, developers and anybody in-between. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 19 down vote favorite
3

I would like to have continous integration (with Jenkins) for my apex code in order to run them automatically after each push to my git repository. Does anyone know a way how to do that?

share|improve this question
We use Jenkins and the deploy Ant task routinely to deploy and test managed packages and customer-specific customizations. See force201.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/continuous-integration for a tweak to the deploy to better integrate the test results. – Keith C Nov 11 '12 at 12:43

5 Answers

up vote 16 down vote accepted

There are a couple of decent Dreamforce presentations here: Team Development: Possible, Probable, and Painless and Continuous Integration in the Cloud.

We ran into some issues with this in practice and there was no way to get true automation (i.e., set it and forget it). We were also setting it up with Selenium.

Here were the issues that I remember.

  1. Some features aren't supported in the metadata API and cannot be moved via the ant migration. If you have any unit tests that work with those features, you have to manually work on your CI org.

  2. Deletions are harder to maintain. You have to manually update and apply a destructiveChanges.xml file or replicate the deletion in the CI org.

  3. We ran into a situation where some metadata XML files had 'invalid' data in them. The suggested solution was to build a post checkout script that manipulates the offending XMLs into valid XMLs. Not ideal.

  4. On projects, we wanted to track just our changes and push out just our changes in source control. In theory, this would allow much easier rebaselining. This would have required more manual maintenance of XML files (e.g., 2 new fields added on Account and only want to push those 2 fields not all (*) fields).

My conclusion is that it is worth doing if you can get it set up, but if you are working on shorter term projects and don't have a decent amount of time budgeted in for it, it probably isn't worth setting up.

Although it isn't CI, check out http://developer.force.com/cookbook/recipe/automated-unit-test-execution. You could set it up to run every hour or something like that.

share|improve this answer
1  
+1 for issue #1. If your codebase is dependent on time-dependent workflows, recursive workflow, M-D rehoming, etc, it's quite difficult to fully automate a fresh install. You can do it with Selenium but it's a bit of a pain. I wish SFDC would put some more resources towards giving developers an experience more competitive with the likes of Java/.NET/Rails etc for CI, but that seems unlikely in the near future. – jkraybill Aug 23 '12 at 5:07
Another issue I'd add: if you're dealing with managed packages, automating the "build" and install of a new package is even more difficult. We've given up and just do periodic manual upload/install/test runs, including automated tests and a manual smoke test. – jkraybill Aug 23 '12 at 5:10
Worth noting is that, at a minimum, the metadata from an org in which you are developing should be backed up nightly so you aren't SOL if someone refreshes by accident. For this, it is easy to set up a simple Jenkins job that runs each night and pulls down all of the metadata and checks it into a repository. – Peter Knolle Aug 23 '12 at 9:59
1  
Regarding issue 2, you might want to take a look at the undeploy tool here, github.com/financialforcedev/df12-deployment-tools. The aim of this tool is to clear out your designated CI org prior to pushing in your org your latest build. – Andrew Fawcett Nov 11 '12 at 13:04
up vote 6 down vote

We're trying to set up the same, and while we still have to get some configurations right, I do think we have gotten the overall setup.

Using github plugins to jenkins you can poll for repository changes. We're using ssh keys between jenkins and github as authentication.

Jenkins uses ANT, and so does the force.com migration tool, you can use the deploy xml file you'd write for the migration tool to run with ant from jenkins, this can include that all tests need to be ran.

I believe this is the setup used by quite some teams already, yet no one seems to have written a full description on how to set it up publicly (at least, I've not found one). I may give it a try once we have our system fully running

share|improve this answer
Thank you! this is a good starting point. – Andree Wille Aug 20 '12 at 12:36
up vote 5 down vote

I'm doing a presentation at Dreamforce '12 on this exact subject: Team Development and Release Management for ISVs

In the session I'll outline going through a complete CI life-cycle (develop, version control, build, package, deploy to AppExchange).

This session is mostly geared to AppExchange releases but could easily be a good building block for anyone whom wants to do CI. I'm hoping to get the Github repo up which will include a link to the Amazon AMI preconfigured like the one we use to manage multiple devs and builds with Jenkins at Bracket Labs

share|improve this answer
Look forward to it! – Peter Knolle Aug 20 '12 at 18:17
Is there any related document or video you can share so that we can also setup CI – Ugesh Gali Sep 27 '12 at 17:54
Ugesh: see github repo here: github.com/BracketLabs/… - this demo will get you started. And I will support working with it. As for the video, I don't know if it's available yet. – jordan.baucke Sep 27 '12 at 17:59
Thank you very much. All the images are broken in the github repo. – Ugesh Gali Sep 27 '12 at 18:07
Just fixed them when I saw that before (I took them down cause they were causing issues (with the Eclipse IDE's memory heap) ... so I need to make a note to delete them from the src directory after you clone it. – jordan.baucke Sep 27 '12 at 19:13
up vote 5 down vote

Check out the sample code for the ApexTestQueueItem sObject here: http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/apexcode/Content/apex_testing_unit_tests_running.htm

and the more involved cookbook recipe: http://developer.force.com/cookbook/cookbookRecipeSource?id=a1V30000000AV1vEAG

share|improve this answer
up vote 2 down vote

Download the Force.com Migration Toolkit and start tinkering with it. The salesforce-ant jar contains a component for deploying code, but that component also allows you to run either all tests or individual tests (specified by a child element under the deploy component).

Unfortunately, there is no component for explicitly running tests, so it looks like (I havent tried this myself) that you must deploy something in order to run the tests.

Hope that helps.

More info on the migration toolkit: http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/daas/salesforce_migration_guide.pdf

share|improve this answer

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.