Some glue to make gulp easier, perhaps even zero- or close-to-zero-conf
!npm
Standing on the shoulders of giants, zarro is a zero- or low-conf orchestration for
(primarily) dotnet/.NET build and test (eg at CI), but it's also so much more - since
it's easy to add your own tasks, you can use zarro for whatever you like, but if you're
looking for CI build / test / coverage* for dotnet/.NET, this might be what you're looking
for.
_(* coverage works well for NUnit / .NET Framework, but I haven't found a nice process
for dotnet core - yet)_
msbuild?Zarro wraps msbuild, using gulp orchestration under the hood. It does, however,
take away the pain of:
- knowing _where_ msbuild lives (since it consumes gulp-msbuild
- being able to use a specific version of msbuild (again, thanks to gulp-msbuild)
- running tests via dotnet test or via the NUnit CLI runner, as appropriate
- running coverage reporting (.NET Framework) via OpenCover
- downloading local variants of tooling required for the above so that your CI server
doesn't have to have them installed, or kept up to date
- note: zarro will not download msbuild tooling, but should work fine with any
installed version of:
- VS Community / Professional / Enterprise
- VS Build Tools
- dotnet sdk (dotnet kindly adds itself to the path)
- packing nuget packages, either from .nuspecs (.NET Framework) or directly
from the .csproj (dotnet core)
Perhaps (though the msbuild discovery is a bit of a PITA, especially since Microsoft
likes to keep us on our toes, mixing up exactly _where_ that's installed to, eg in
vs2019. The real win comes from:
- out of the box, on a simple-ish repo, zarro should be able to build and test,
as long as you use the naming convention of {Assembly}.Tests for test projects
(though it will also find Test.{Assembly} and an ubiquitous Tests assembluy)
- it's easy to add more tasks to your pipeline for further processing
- use the gulp orchestration framework to extend or override available tasks
gulp? 3 or 4? They don't play well together!Zarro has you covered here. The heart of Zarro was originally built for gulp 3.
Version 4 came out and broke _everything_. I didn't feel like rewriting perfectly
acceptable tasks, but I did want to keep up with the latest version of gulp and
the speed advantages that were promised. As such, Zarro can consume and adapt
gulp 3 tasks to run under gulp 4.
1. npm init -y (if you don't already have a package.json
2. npm install --save-dev zarro
3. start adding scripts! for example:
``json`
"scripts": {
"build": "zarro @",
"test": "zarro @",
"zarro": "zarro"
}
(the task should invoke zarro's inbuilt build task (and some earlierdotnet
ones to download tooling, as required) so that when test-time comes, assemblies
are already built (required for .NET Framework / NUnit runner, and optimised for by performing the build and testing without rebuild)).
Add new custom tasks by invoking zarro --create-task to guide you throughlocal-tasks
the process. This will create a skeleton task file for you under
with some of the boiler-plating already done.
should tell you something
similar to:- help
- shows help / usage
- help:environment
- shows help about environment variables zarro observes (same as running with --help)
- build
- attempts to build all found .net solutions
- test-dotnet
- test .net projects based on conventions
- test project names should match
.Tests or .Test or plain old Tests
- assumes test are nunit
- cover-dotnet
- test with coverage
- can use dotCover or OpenCover
- generate-reports
- generate html reports from OpenCover results
- default-tools-installer
- installs the default helper tooling from nuget
- nunit cli
- dotCover
- OpenCover
- ReportGenerator
- install-tools
- called before build
- defaults to install default tools
- override with an empty task if not useful
- dotnet-publish
- runs dotnet cli build with publish options
- nuget-restor
- restores nuget packages
- run automatically as part of build
- release-npm
- perform guided release of npm packages
- can do beta releases
- will automatically
- increment version
- git commit
- git tag
- git push
- update-self
- updates to zarro@latest
- update-git-submodules
- updates all git submodules in the repo
- pretest
- place-holder: override this to run something before testing
- verify-up-to-date
- verifies that the current branch is up-to-date with the main one
- will check against {remote}/{main branch} if possibleZarro doesn't do what I want out of the box
Zarro is designed to be zero- to low- conf. You can guide many aspects of available
tasks with environment variables. Running
will show you
all observed environment variables and where they are applicable. I suggest using
cross-env and applying these variables in one place, to keep things simpler. For
example, NExpect does the following:$3
`json
"scripts": {
"zarro": "cross-env DOTNET_CORE=1 BUILD_EXCLUDE=src/PeanutButter// PACK_INCLUDE= PACK_EXCLUDE=Tests,CoreConsumer,src/PeanutButter// TEST_EXCLUDE=src/PeanutButter// zarro",
"build": "run-s \"zarro build\"",
"test": "run-s \"zarro test-dotnet\""
}
`in the above:
-
instructs zarro to use dotnet instead of searching for msbuild
- instructs zarro to exclude everything under that folder, recursively
(NExpect imports PeanutButter as a submodule to use some shared code without relying
on another package dependency)
- similarly TEST_EXCLUDE excludes PeanutButter tests
- similarly, PACK_INCLUDE and PACK_EXCLUDE control nuget packing within NExpect$3
Zarro will automatically create a .zarro-defaults next to your package.json if it
is not found. In here, we can add key-value-pairs of environment variables to set
when running zarro. These values will be overridden by any existing environment variables,
so if you need to override a variable which is set on the hosting system, you should
use cross-env as above. However, for many situations, specifying environment variables
in .zarro-defaults makes npm script setup a lot easier. For example, if we use .zarro-defaults,
we can modify the example above:
Update package.json with:
`json
"scripts": {
"build": "zarro @",
"test": "zarro test-dotnet"
}
`
Update .zarro-defaults to contain:
DOTNET_CORE=1
BUILD_EXCLUDE=src/PeanutButter/*/
PACK_INCLUDE=*
PACK_EXCLUDE=Tests,CoreConsumer,src/PeanutButter/*/
TEST_EXCLUDE=src/PeanutButter/*/
Note also here the shorthand of
- if a task has the same name as the npm script
used to invoke it, this is a quick way to surface that task to npm run -space.Custom tasks
Zarro will also search two folders:
- local-tasks
- override-tasks
in the root of your repo, for extra tasks that you can access from your npm scripts.
These can be brand-new functionality you'd like to add to your repo's build system,
or you can _override existing tasks_, if they don't suit you. For example, if the
pack
task doesn't do exactly what you want, copy from node_modules/zarro/gulp-tasks
into your folder and modify it to suit you. If you find a generic solution
to the problem you have which others might find useful or fix a bug, I'd like to know
about it. PRs for fixes and extension tasks which others could use will be appreciated.Examples of custom tasks that I've written in the past
- a watcher to automatically recompile scss to .css
- orchestration of build / test of sub-projects that aren't .NET
- automatic version incrementing of packages before release
- committing, tagging and pushing new changes to GitHub
- I've found that writing a meta task called release can make it much
less painful to perform a release of my nuget packages, for example.
This meta task would:
- build
- test
- increment package versions
- pack
- push packages
- commit the updates package definitions
- tag the release
- push the tag and changes to GitHubAPI
Zarro provides some convenience functionality from baked-in modules. To access a module,
the global
requireModule function will resolve the correct location for you. Modules
live under the gulp-tasks/modules folder. Most modules will return a single function,
though there are some exceptions. Some modules may be of interest to custom tasks, eg:-
gulp
- you should wherever you would have normally
done require("gulp"). This gets you the patched version of gulp 4 which
will happily consume gulp 3 tasks and which has inbuilt support for help
for your tasks on both gulp 3 and 4. Most importantly, if you _do not_ use this
export, your tasks may not be correctly registered.
- env
- provides a utility object to resolve environment variables for you
- can register an environment variable as known with a default
value and help. See register-environment-variables.ts for examples.
When you use this function, you can have a central configuration for
a default value for an environment variable and your environment
variable will be displayed in the --show-env output
- resolve resolves environment variables for you. It can be invoked with
one or more variable names, so can be used to fall back from one variable
onto another. It will also resolve back values if registered.
- associate associates one or more variables with one or more tasks,
primarily to show which tasks are affected by which variables when
running with --show-env
- can resolve an environment variable to an array for you,
with an optional delimiter parameter, which defaults to comma
- resolveNumber resolves a numeric value from the named environment
value or throws if the value can't be resolved as a number, effectively
stopping execution. If you're expecting a number (eg port or max thread
count) you can simply resolveNumber and an invalid value would cause
execution to stop with a reasonable message
- resolveFlag resolves boolean values from environment variables
- true for: "yes", "true" or "1"
- false for: "no", "false" or "0"
- throws for unknown values
- system
- function to run other process and get back stdio results from said processes
-
- single function to resolve an array of masks that could be used in a
where those masks can be inclusive or exclusive
-
- provides a single function to find a locally-downloaded , automatically
downloading it if required. Use this if you need to use nuget.exe operations
and don't want to set up your build host with a pathed nuget.exe
- git utilities
-
-
-
- string padding
-
-
- There are many more utilities in there, feel free to browse the source.
History
If you've made it thus far, some light history might be of interest. Zarro's core
functionality comes from another repo of mine: gulp-tasks
which was traditionally consumed as a git submodule. However, it seems that a lot
of people don't really "get" git submodules:
- people forget (or don't understand that they need to)
after
a git clone or a git pull. Some modern git clients are doing this for the user,
but not all of them.
- people don't seem to understand how submodules are stored (literally just a hash and
an url), so they don't pay attention when committing them. In particular, I have seen
my fair share of inadvertent "submodule wars" where changes upstream aren't applied
after a pull (ie, people forget to run git submodule update --init), then they
re-commit back the _old version_ of the module that they have locally. So fixes tend
to become unfixed
- in addition, gulp-tasks requires dependencies to be installed in the hosting repo's
package.json, meaning that (a) the hosting repo has to "know too much" about the
requirements of gulp-tasks and (b) upstream changes may require changes to a repo's
package.json (and an npm install). Whilst this was (eventually) automated as part
of gulp-tasks, it seems unnecessarily complex.
- the solution seemed clear: make gulp-tasks` available via an npm package