A Tasty Pixel » Development

Local Continuous Integration Setup With Git Post-Commit Hook Script

I have lots unit tests, but I don’t have a Continuous Integration server setup, and I sometimes forget my tests are there.

I know. Bad me. I was up late last night getting some failing unit tests to pass again, after forgetting I even had unit tests. Ugh. This would have been much easier if I knew I’d broken a test when I broke it; as it was, I had to go back and try to remember what I was working on when they broke!

So, to stop that happening in the future, I fiddled around with my local repository and whipped up a script that automatically runs tests in the background, on a separate temporary cloned version of the repository.

If build or tests fail, I get a nice little Notification Center message which I can click to see a report and build log. Then I can fix it and amend the commit as necessary.

It’s a script that’s invoked by a Post-Commit git hook, and it’s run in the background using nohup so it doesn’t make me wait and mess with my workflow. It just all happens transparently in the background.

Here’s how I did it.

If you’re interested in the technical details around how music apps get made, this is an excellent talk by music technologist Greg Cerveny on creating music apps. He’s interviewed a bunch of developers (including the developers of Patterning, Fugue Machine, Elastic Drums, and me) about their process and their background, and these are the results. Worth a watch!

A few people mentioned that they wanted to see the technical stuff that I discarded from the last video. I promise nothing, but here it is, sans-Benny Hill theme music.

I’ve just finished working on Loopy’s audio playback system, which streams the various layers that make up a track from disk. This episode I’m talking about how that works, and how I’m handling quality control.

Building stuff! I’ve been working on track recording and layering lately. This episode I’m talking about the complexities involved in non-destructive layering, and how I’m making sure everything’s rock-solid via unit testing.

Not dead, you guys. Just working on something I’m not quite ready to show you yet. It’ll be worth the wait, though.

Back home again, and working on Loopy Masterpiece’s action infrastructure: this is how Masterpiece’s universal action triggering and sequencing is probably going to function, allowing for a non-destructive workflow and performance automation, among other cool things.

I’ve been doing some work under the hood this week: working on Loopy Masterpiece’s data model and figuring out how sessions are going to be stored on disk. The answer: Core Data.