Ship It! - 2.3 Script Your Build

You have a problem if you do anything by hand in your build or packaging process.  Humans forget steps and lose focus - machines don't.

Tip 4: Script builds on day one

Tip 5: Any machine can be a build machine

How Do I Get Started?

• have a team member manually build the system while you take notes
• define the individual steps
• pick a build tool
• incrementally script each step eliminating manual operations one by one
• run the script on another workstation
• have another team member use the script without your help

You should be able to build your entire product:

• with one command
• from SCM
• on any team member's machine
• with no external environmental requirements, such as network drives

In Java, Ant is the defacto build tool but it can get messy pretty quickly.  Crafting if-then-else logic using XML constructs isn't pretty.  I'm glad to see tools like Gradle gaining some traction.