Automate build process with the build script

The process of building applications for production usually involves executing several steps and building angular applications is no different. The repetitive steps are in the following sequence:

1. Get a tag and branch name from git
2. Build the application for production by using ng build —prod command
3. Update the configuration file of config.json
4. Zip the build and release it

Prerequisite

As I already mentioned we have the angular application. We keep the configuration settings of our application in the config.json file. If you want to find out more about how we use the configuration file in our app, please check here.

To update the config.json file for production we decided to use the jq tool which had to be installed on a build machine. We build the application on OS X, so we installed it through brew, like

brew install jq

Description

In the script below you can see that we followed the required steps.

1. We read the latest git tag and current branch name from git and assigned it to variables.
2. We build the application by executing ng build —prod and placed the build to the wwwroot folder.
3. Updating config.json under wwwroot/assets folder with using jq tool. We read the config.json file, find a field, assign a new value to it, redirect the output content to the newly created temp.json file, and finally replace the content in config.json within the content in temp.json. Something like:

jq ".field = "new_value"" config.json > temp.json && mv temp.json config.json

4. We zipped the build with the updated config.json file and moved the zipped file to the root of the project.

And here is the full build script that we used:

#!/bin/sh
CONFIG_PATH=wwwroot/assets/config.json
CURRENT_TAG=$(git describe --tags `git rev-list --tags --max-count=1`) # the latest tag
CURRENT_BRANCH=$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)
ENV_TYPE=${1:-"production"}

echo ""
echo "app version \"$CURRENT_TAG\""
echo "building in branch \"$CURRENT_BRANCH\""
echo "environment type \"$ENV_TYPE\""

echo ""
echo "Start building the app..."
ng build --prod
echo "End building the app!!!"

if [ $CURRENT_BRANCH == "master" ]
then
    CURRENT_BRANCH=""
else
    CURRENT_BRANCH="-$CURRENT_BRANCH"
fi


jq ".version = \"$CURRENT_TAG$CURRENT_BRANCH\"" $CONFIG_PATH > temp.json && mv temp.json $CONFIG_PATH
jq ".ops_environment = \"$ENV_TYPE\"" $CONFIG_PATH > temp.json && mv temp.json $CONFIG_PATH
jq ".authentication = true" $CONFIG_PATH > temp.json && mv temp.json $CONFIG_PATH
jq ".authorizationHeader = """ $CONFIG_PATH > temp.json && mv temp.json $CONFIG_PATH
jq ".apiUrl = "http://10.0.0.84:60820/ws"" $CONFIG_PATH > temp.json && mv temp.json $CONFIG_PATH
jq ".tenant = """ $CONFIG_PATH > temp.json && mv temp.json $CONFIG_PATH
jq ".authenticationType = "windows"" $CONFIG_PATH > temp.json && mv temp.json $CONFIG_PATH
jq ".signalr.url = "http://10.0.0.84:60820/ws/signalr"" $CONFIG_PATH > temp.json && mv temp.json $CONFIG_PATH
jq ".signalr.hubName = "OPSHub"" $CONFIG_PATH > temp.json && mv temp.json $CONFIG_PATH


echo ""
echo "Config file has been set up !!!"
echo ""

cd wwwroot

zip -r Apps-$CURRENT_TAG.zip .
# move file to the root of this project
mv Apps-rc-$CURRENT_TAG.zip ../

echo "Release folder zipped."
echo ""

Executing script

The build is saved as release_script.sh and is placed under the root of our project. Before executing the script we added the permission to the file by running following command in the folder where our script exists:

chmod 755 release_script.sh

The file permission can be different in your case.

Executing the file, navigate to the folder where script file exists and execute the script

./release_script.sh

If everything is set up correctly in the script, the zip file with build and the updated config.json file will be created under the root of the project.

Conclusion

Hopefully sharing this can encourage others to think and move from repetitive tasks to fully automated ones.