One of the targets of the NativeScript team is improvement of the community contribution and collaboration. As a step in this direction, we wanted to have our Continuous Integration triggerable and its results visible from outside the internal network. To add even more good we wanted to have all packages that made it to the master branch available for everyone eager to play with an unofficial feature or a bugfix.
Without further ado, I'm happy to announce that we now have our builds running on Travis-CI.
Let's take a look at the following workflow to illustrate better what that means:
- A NativeScript developer (be it a community member or a member of the core team) implements a new feature in their own branch. The feature might include code in the runtimes (android or ios, the cross-platform modules or both).
- Each time they push to the NativeScript remote or they create a Pull Request to the NativeScript repo, a build runs at Travis-CI. The build packs the code and runs the tests for it. (Note: available for android and cross-platform modules only with ios coming in the near future)
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Once the feature is complete and tested, the members of the core team review it and if accepted, they merge it to the master branch.
- A new build gets triggered and once successful, a package appears at npmjs.com, tagged next.
As a result, you can see the results of your changes immediately. The need for you to have the entire environment set on your machine is eliminated and you can concentrate on the code you want to contribute.
A short reference:
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How do you see the test results?
Simply hit the display link in your PR screen:
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How do you check which tests failed and which passed?
Monitor the Travis-CI build and find the test results:
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How do you use the unofficial build?
By running tns plugin add tns-core-modules@next in your project dir.
Well, that's it! In addition to the benefits of seeing the test results, we believe the @next packages are a way for more stable releases - no set of tests can ensure the quality of a release better than having its unofficial builds run in the context of the vast variety of community applications.
The team is looking forward to your contributions!
What do you think about it? Post a comment.
