It’s been over a year since the last release of BuildReactor!
So far I only maintained a simple changelog for all previous releases (https://adamnowotny.wordpress.com/2014/10/31/buildreactor-previous-versions/).
A new version 0.8.0 has just been published and given the amount of changes I thought it would be a better idea to describe it all in a bit more than a single tweet.
If you already installed BuildReactor it should be updated automatically, but if not you can install the latest version on the Google Chrome WebStore
The source code is at GitHub so you can also customize HTML/CSS if needed.
So what changed?
AngularJS
The whole UI has been rewritten from jQuery to AngularJS.
While it took some time it simplified the code a lot and I find it way more maintainable now.
I’d prefer replacing jQuery with Angular gradually and releasing more often but that turned out to be a challenge and in the end the decision was made just to write the UI from scratch.
There is quite a learning curve in learning Angular in my opinion but compared to maintainability and testability of jQuery code it was definitely worth it.
Bootstrap has also been updated and that was a good enough excuse to make some other UI changes.
Old settings screen (0.7.7)
New settings screen (0.8.0)
Reordering
As you can see on the above screenshot there is now a list of currently monitored builds.
You can finally use drag&drop to change the ordering.
The same can be done on the list of services to the left.
This should help to display builds in some meaningful order.
Fullscreen mode header removed
Fullscreen mode used to have a header with BuildReactor logo and buttons on the top.
As this mode is supposed to be used as information radiator it would usually be zoomed to take up the whole screen.
The problem was that the header took up too much of the screen space if there were only few builds.
Full screen header in 0.7.7
Full screen header removed in 0.8.0
Jenkins
The way Jenkins projects are shown has been optimised so it should be more reliable and faster for those of you who have a large number of projects on a single Jenkins instance.
GoCD
ThoughtWorks GO has been released as open-source and changed name to GoCD.
If you’re looking for a free, scalable and stable CI server than I highly recommend you check it out.
What sets it apart is the concept of build pipelines which make it very easy to see which revisions of your component get promoted to the different environments like CI, QA, UAT, PROD or whatever your testing and deployment strategy is.
The way it allows to describe the jobs execution and dependencies between the different components of your application is quite powerful.
It might not be as easy to configure as some other solutions, but then again…you should make your build steps as simple as running a command from the command-line anyway so this should not be a big issue.
The new website of the project is at http://www.go.cd/
Disable services automatically
Those of you working in an environment where LDAP passwords are reset regularly and too many attempts to use old password result in account lockout will most likely appreciate that the new version of BuildReactor detects authorisation problems.
If your password has expired the affected service will be disabled to prevent the above situation.
Notification will also be displayed in that case so you know you need to update the settings.
Password expired notification
adamnowotny.wordpress.com 