Category Archives: Development Process

getting started with gitlab

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CodeRanch is talking about moving to Git for our source code. Some of the moderators expressed a preference for GitLab. I’ve used GitHub, but not GitLab so decided to try it out with one of my personal projects. Looking at it, GitLab has built in CI so I want to see if i can switch to that and get off Jenkins for my pet project.

Signing up for GitLab

You can register with a new account for GitLab or use your credentials for other services including Google, Twitter, GitHub and BitBucket. It feels weird to me to sign in for a version control system with the credentials for another version control system so I created a new account.

While signing up, it automatically imported my gravatar. I had an old picture on there so fixed that. I then added some basic information to my GitLab profile

I set up an SSH key to make it easy to commit from my home computer:

  1. Settings
  2. SSH Keys
  3. Paste in key

I also set up two factor:

  1. Settings
  2. Account
  3. The very first option is “Enable two factor authentication”
  4. It uses Google Authenticator which is my first choice of two factor. They also supply backup codes.

Migrating a repository from GitHub

GitLab has a page about migrating from GitHub. The most important pre-requisite is to make sure each committer to the GitHub project has an account on GitLab. Conveniently, I am the only person who has ever committed to this project!

I then migrated in:

  1. Create a personal access token on GitHub just for this migration
  2. Click “Create a project”
  3. Choose “Import a project” tab
  4. Enter personal access token for github and choose “List your repositories”. Note that this lists both your personal repositories and all of these for GitHub organizations you have access to
  5. Click “Import” on the row next to the repository to migrate. (There’s also an “Import all” on top. I’m not looking to migrate all my repositories though!). Nothing appeared to happen for a minute. I must have missed a status warning. But then the page refreshed and had a “done” checkbox.
  6. Delete the personal access token from GitHub. I don’t like to leave extra access laying around enabled

I confirmed the same number of commits (including the latest), branches and tags are all there.

Jenkins integration

I’ve been running this job on Jenkins each night to check for changes. Since this is a public repository, accessing it for polling is easy and worked on the first shot. While I’d like to switch to GitLab CI, I’m going with incremental progress. GitLab has a good page on interacting with Jenkins.

I temporarily made this a private project to re-test. I confirmed that I could commit and that Jenkins failed to pull. Then I tried to set up Jenkins to be able to interact with project.

When using my own account, I can set up a token with read access to all my projects, but not a specific one. I think I’d have to create an extra account on GitLab for Jenkins if I wanted it to have only access to specific projects. Since this is just an experiment, I’ll use my own token for now.

Failing with the GitLab plugin

  1. Installed the GitLab plugin on Jenkins
  2. In GitLab, went to Settings > Access Tokens
  3. Created a token with read_repository permissions
  4. In Jenkins, manage > Configure System
  5. Add a GitLab Connection. I like that it uses Jenkins Credentials for securing the token
  6. Click “Test Connection”
  7. Using https://gitlab.com/boyarsky gives Client error: HTTP 401 Unauthorized
  8. Using https://gitlab.com/ gives Client error: HTTP 403 Forbidden

I noticed that the Jenkins GitLab plugin is not well supported. The primary committer wrote that he doesn’t use GitLab daily anymore and this affects his time spent on this project.

At this point, I gave up and just set up polling. I created a credential with the username boyarsky and the password as my personal access token. (That I set up while attempting to get GitLab working.) This worked on the first shot.

Now time to start looking at GitLab Ci…

another agile game virtual/remote team style – circle connections

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Last year, I wrote about Virtual/remote friendly agile games. Yesterday at the NYC Scrum user group, we played an agile game about circle connections. The game was:

  1. Stand in a circle with the people at your table.
  2. Everyone picks two people (but don’t say who they are)
  3. Keep moving until everyone is equidistant from their two partners.

The idea is to show how chaos lessens and equilibrium is achieved. Ok.  Physical movement. Can we make that virtual? Actually yes!

Using a tool like togetherjs’s drawing tool, you can see everyone’s cursor. So all team members can move around the cursor to meet the equidistant requirement.

Not just any collaborative editing tool will do. It needs to be one like the drawing tool which displays all the mouse cursors!

We also played a game where we built towers with newspaper. That one I don’t think I can make remote team friendly!

ant and junit5 – simulating sysproperty

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In JUnit 5, you use the junitlauncher Ant task rather than the junit Ant task. Unfortunately, this isn’t a drop in replacement. For example, junitlauncher doesn’t offer the option to fork and run the JUnit tests. As a result, it also doesn’t have the nested sysproperty tag so you can pass system properties. This is a problem.

For the CodeRanch, we set a system property for the default file encoding. Since developers are around the world, we can’t assume everyone “just has” the encoding set.

Disclaimer

Since JUnit 5 functionality for Ant was introduced this year, I’m hoping what I did in this post is a short term workaround.

Option 1 – pass to Ant

You can pass the the properties to Ant itself as described on Stack Overflow. For example:

__JAVA_OPTIONS=-Dfile.encoding=ISO8859_1

pros:

  • simple

cons:

  • subpar – all the developers need to remember to do this. The reason we had it in Ant in the first place is so folks wouldn’t need to remember
  • for some use cases, the desired system properties could be derived and not know when calling Ant

Option 2- Nashorn Code

Since JUnit 5 is being run in the same process as Ant itself, you need to set the system property in memory. Luckily, Ant allows you to run scripting in various languages. I chose Nashorn because it is built into Java. (There are other variants of this; see below)

<script language="javascript">
  <![CDATA[
    var imports = new JavaImporter(java.lang.System);
    imports.System.setProperty('file.encoding', 'ISO8859_1')
  ]]>
</script>

Pros

  • Short and simple
  • Nashorn is deprecated for removal starting Java 11. This means at some point, it can be removed. (I’m hopeful that the Ant task itself will support system properties by then.

Cons

  • Requires Java 8 or higher
  • The System property is set for the remainder of the build (you could write another code block to null it out after the test if this is a problem)

Variants of option 2

If you are running Ant with a version of Java below Java 8, you could use this technique, but use Rhino instead. I didn’t test this, but I think the code is



importClass(java.lang.System);
System.setProperty('file.encoding', 'ISO8859_1')






JUnit 5 itself uses Java 8 so nobody would be in the situation of pre-Java 8 and trying to use this blog post.


If you are running Ant with a version of Java where Nashorn has been removed, you could use Groovy or Jython as the embedded language. The code is simpler. I didn’t chose this because it requires adding another jar to the Ant directory. I prefer to minimize these set up extensions. Especially for a feature like this which is likely to be temporary.


System.setProperty('file.encoding', 'ISO8859_1')