The point is missed

In a previous post I ran into some problems with Buildr’s support for Specs in combination with JUnit. I googled a bit and came up with nothing so I did what all newbies do. Ask the pros on the mailinglist :) (I stayed away from “plz help” and “could you plz send me a patch”). I was (of course) suggested to try the latest from head and I felt an unpleasant resistance towards downloading archives, figuring out how to point gems to the latest version etc. All of those things are probably simple but I just want to develop some Scala code and did not look forward to it.

Well, boy was I worrying in vain!

Side-note: After years of pre-switch anxiety I recently just got over myself and converted to Linux from Windows. I am a very happy Ubuntu user and I think that this post will illuminate some of the advantages I experience when it comes to software development.

The scala-support is relatively new in Buildr so it seems like a good idea to make it easy to use the latest development version of Buildr. Buildr makes it’s source available via GitHub. With my recent experiences with Mercurial I had the feeling that I would much prefer Git over Svn. Ok, let’s get started…

Keep in mind that most of the console-text you see below is output. It is actually 3 very simple steps followed by a 4th to actually test it. For your convenience I have marked everything you actually need to type in red.

Step 1 – install git

jocke@euroblok:~/dev/3rd/buildr-head$ sudo apt-get install git-core

3 seconds later:

...

(Reading database ... 222430 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking git-core (from .../git-core_1%3a1.5.4.3-1ubuntu2_i386.deb) ...
Setting up git-core (1:1.5.4.3-1ubuntu2) ...

That’s how hard it is to install git :)

Step 2 – cloning the buildr repository

Now lets clone Buildr’s repository:

jocke@euroblok:~/dev/3rd/buildr-head$ git clone git://github.com/vic/buildr.git

And git starts getting the Buildr code:

Initialized empty Git repository in /home/jocke/dev/3rd/buildr-head/buildr/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 4075, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (945/945), done.
remote: Total 4075 (delta 3061), reused 4075 (delta 3061)
Receiving objects: 100% (4075/4075), 2.04 MiB | 554 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (3061/3061), done.

That only took a few seconds.

Step 3 – adding your repository to the path

I look in the fetched repository and in the root there is a script named _buildr that according to it’s comments should be used if you want to run buildr from source without having to do a rake install.

Not having to do stuff is exactly what I’m after, let’s make the final touch so I can use alternate between using buildr from my repository and running the latest stable version. I create a launch-script on my source-path, in my case have ~/bin on my path so I create it there like this:

jocke@euroblok:~/bin$ cat > _buildr
#!/bin/sh
/home/jocke/dev/3rd/buildr-head/buildr/_buildr

jocke@euroblok:~/bin$ chmod +x _buildr

Just end the cat > _buildr command with ctrl+c when done typing or just use vim or whatever you prefer instead. I used cat from stdin here just to be able to show all relevant information in the post.

Step 4 – test it!

Now I can use buildr from source whenever I want by using _buildr instead of buildr when I build:

jocke@euroblok:~/dev/publisher/scala-core$ _buildr test
(in /home/jocke/dev/publisher, development)
Building publisher:scala-core
Compiling publisher:scala-core into /home/jocke/dev/publisher/scala-core/target/classes
Compiling publisher:scala-core:test into /home/jocke/dev/publisher/scala-core/target/test/classes
Running tests in publisher:scala-core
Running java com.agical.publisher.content.site.PublishSiteGraphSpec
Specification "PublishSiteGraphSpec"
  specifies
  o directories are nodes
    Won't work until MemoryResourceRepository adds resources for directories. (PublishSiteGraphSpec.scala:19)

Total for specification "PublishSiteGraphSpec":
Finished in 0 second, 58 ms
1 example (1 skipped), 0 assertion, 0 failure, 0 error

[Completed] Your build has completed: /home/jocke/dev/publisher
buildr default
Completed in 7.667s

That was not so hard and from now on I can pull the latest code from the repository whenever I like by running…

jocke@euroblok:~/dev/3rd/buildr-head/buildr$ git pull
Already up-to-date.

…from my repository. Sweet!