The evolution of an Open Source project's build automation

Luke Daley is the founder of Geb — the Groovy based web automation framework. Geb was originally hatched inside another project but quickly grew into a project in its own right. As the project grew and evolved, different tools and strategies were employed to automate as much as possible of the development and build process with the goal of trying to achieve a lot with a little.

In this talk, Luke will relive the project's history, focusing on how different tools were used to meet different automation needs and some general musings on running an indie Open Source project. We'll start at the beginning with the simple Maven based build infrastructure and work our way through:

• Automating the creation of the user manual (a.k.a. the Book of Geb)
• Moving from Maven to Gradle (and why)
• Hosting a project with Codehaus
• Modularising to support different testing frameworks
• Automating publication of the Geb website
• Building a Grails plugin as an integrated module
• Developing custom build logic with Gradle
• Digitally signing build artifacts
• Publishing a project to the Maven Central repository (with Gradle)
• Managing and deploying a Google App Engine app as part of your build

Also covering other hurdles, challenges and fun encountered along the way.

While not specifically about Gradle, the build tool used to solve these problems which Luke now works on full time, we will be discussing how these particular issues were solved using Gradle.

This talk should be of interest to anyone who has faced similar challenges in running an indie Open Source project, who is thinking about starting their own Open Source project or who is just interested in a behind the scenes view into how an Open Source project evolves.

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