Particle PO CI

Container / Virtualization

gitlab-ci uses a docker container.

# use the official gcc image, based on debian
# can use verions as well, like gcc:5.2
# see https://hub.docker.com/_/gcc/
image: gcc

Travis CI on the other hand uses “sudo enabled, full virtual machine per build”.

dist: trusty
sudo: required
language: generic

Install / Bootstrap

Before doing the build we need to set up the build environment. While this isn’t that difficult to do from scratch there is an existing project, po-util, that will do the job.

build:
  stage: build
  before_script: 
    - ci/po-install.sh

install:
  - ci/po-install.sh

The po-install.sh is not very complex but to summarize it does the following things:

• Installs prerequistes for scripts
• Installs scripts from po-util
• Configures settings for po, or loads those stored in the repo.
• po install which ensures we have all tools and libraries required for the build.

Note: For travis-ci you can cache the ~/.po-util/ directory to speed up subsequent builds:

cache:
  directories:
  - $HOME/.po-util

po-config

This configuration (stored at ~/.po-util/config) contains variables used by the po script.

BASE_DIR="${HOME}/.po-util/src"
PARTICLE_FIRMWARE_URL='https://github.com/particle-iot/firmware.git'
FIRMWARE_PARTICLE="${HOME}/.po-util/src/particle"
FIRMWARE_DUO="${HOME}/.po-util/src/redbearduo"
FIRMWARE_PI="${HOME}/.po-util/src/pi"
export PARTICLE_DEVELOP=1
BRANCH='release/stable'
BRANCH_DUO='duo'
AUTO_HEADER=false

Build

This is where we get to the real build.

gitlab-ci:

build:
  stage: build
  script: 
    - ci/gitlab_build.sh

travis-ci:

script:
  - ci/po-build.sh

This is where po hides some of the complexity, but it also places certain requirements on the structure of your project. One of these requirements is that your firmware is in ./firmware/ rather than ./src/, which is what Particle recommends in their project template.

po photon build

Deploy

I found it very easy to deploy artifacts of the build stage in gitlab-ci, but I have not yet implemented it for travis-ci. Ideally I would like this to only deploy the final bin for each of the device types that I built, but this will require a little more scripting.

build:
  stage: build
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - bin/
    when: on_success
    expire_in: 30 days