Got an article that explains Bamboo best practices for plans, stages, jobs, tasks to build and deploy to Dev Integration, QA, and production?

Question

I'm setting up Bamboo 3.3.3 with the cool Tomcat 7 deploy task for a Grails app. I created a "DEPLOY" stage but when I specify the Grails WAR file that came from my "BUILD" stage, Bamboo complains because the artifact isn't in the current stage directory structure. Bummer.

Before I go down the path of fixing that, I looked for some articles on best practices from end to end for Bamboo... best I could find is Mister Dumay's article on deploying to Tomcat (which is the topic that started my Monday morning), but he just throws the deploy into a new plan without any other stages - which is great for an example, but doesn't work in the overall plan I've got.

http://blogs.atlassian.com/2011/05/continuous_deployment_with_bamboo_and_tomcat/

-T

ReneR · Answer

* So you build mostly on Linux?

* What build tool are you using? Rake?

* How do you manage dependencies?

* What do you use for issue/bug tracking?

Is your interest entirely comparative? I.e. You have your requirements:

* Build a grails webapp

* Deploy build to Tomcat

* Apply label to a build, deploy to a test environment (QA)

* Promote build from test environment to Production. With rollback if needed

And you want to understand how Bamboo does this better than Hudson/Jenkins/Anthill/TeamCity/etc?

Or is it more... what's the best CI-tool-agnostic way of doing above?

Tim Colson (yahoo) · Answer

Thanks, Jens - I look forward to upcoming articles from James, every little bit helps. :-)

Tim Colson (yahoo) · Answer

Hi Rene -- I knocked this down -1 because it's not really an answer per se, but thanks for the comment. :-)

I've used CI for nearly ten years myself, and I agree there is a lot of details that could go into an article. What I'm looking for is an explanation of why Atlassian built Bamboo the way it did with Projects, Plans, Stages, Jobs and Tasks. The manual just says what they are, but not why they exist and how to use them.

In my case, and possibly others, a dev group is working on a webapp, this one in Grails. I'm interesting in hearing how Atlassians would use Bamboo to build it, deploy to a development integration Tomcat instance, promote a labeled build to a QA environment, label the WAR artifact, file bug reports against that build, send emails to the team with custom links to the build, inject passwords that aren't in the src repo, create a manual stage (?) to deploy the app to a production server, and maybe roll back in case of problems post deploy.

As I write this, I see that I'm actually asking about SCM, and issue tracking, and versioning...etc, so as you pointed out, there is a LOT of potential info.

I'm not looking for all the answers, but I am looking for any articles specific to the novel features in Bamboo and how they can work together to bring more value than say Hudson/Jenkins/Anthill/TeamCity/etc. :-)