Structure

How does this system work?

Our build and pack system follows the structure that is outlined below to give you the ability to create a powerful build system for your projects to ensure that you provide developers short commands to build the project and to simplify the complicated build operations.

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Required structure

The following structure is required for every project that uses this build toolset:

• Project directory

  • tools (directory, cloned as a git submodule. Consult the source code for more info.)

  • vendor (directory, you'll have to create the below files and this directory yourself)

    • vnd_build.py (file, list of instructions for build)

    • vnd_clean.py (file, list of instructions for cleanup)

    • vnd_test.py (file, list of instructions for test)

    • vnd_increment.py (file, list of instructions for version incrementation)

    • vnd_vendorize.py (file, list of instructions for dependency vendoring)

    • vnd_gendocs.py (file, list of instructions for documentation generation)

    • vnd_packdocs.py (file, list of instructions for documentation packing)

    • vnd_packbin.py (file, list of instructions for artifact packing)

    • vnd_pushbin.py (file, list of instructions for pushing to package registry)

    • vnd_liquidize.py (file, list of instructions for project obsoletion)

    • vnd_updatedeps.py (file, list of instructions for updating project dependencies)

    • vnd_listprojs.py (file, list of instructions for listing project files)

Dependency vendoring may be required for offline builds, especially .NET projects that use NuGet to fetch their dependencies. In this case, you'll have to implement the localize function.

How the project calls the build scripts is entirely up to the project and not to a standard Makefile that makes use of those scripts found in the tools directory.

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Vendor Python scripts

When you begin writing vendor scripts for your projects, you'll have to consider the following:

Argument signatures for some actions

Not all actions that ADT supports contain the same argument signatures. Therefore, it's best to follow this:

• Build arguments and test arguments are provided with the first argument, build_args and test_args, before the extra arguments, extra_args. Therefore, you'll need to provide those two arguments when defining the vnd_build() and the vnd_test() functions, like this:

  def vnd_build(args, extra_args):
      # Your code here

• Extra arguments are arguments that are unknown to the ADT hook for each action. However, build_args is populated by -b (--build-args) switch, and test_args is populated by -t (--test-args) switch.

• Increment action doesn't support extra arguments, because it assumes that, after the old version (old_version) and the new version (new_version) is specified, extra arguments are specified as extra versions (api_versions), such as codenames or API versions. However, you'll need to define all three arguments when defining vnd_increment(), like this:

  def vnd_increment(old_version, new_version, api_versions):
      # Your code here

Pre-action and post-action events

If you want to specify the instructions that you want to run before the real event, you'll have to define either one or both of the parameterless functions that are named like this:

• vnd_preaction(): Contains instructions that are executed before the action

• vnd_postaction(): Contains instructions that are executed after the successful action run.

For example, vnd_prebuild() defines pre-build actions and vnd_postbuild() defines post-build actions, and are located in the vnd_build.py module.

Please note that the arguments are not supported in these functions.

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Other tools

When it comes to ADT's other tools, here are the available tools that you can use:

Standalone actions

Action	Usage	Description
intreport	-l [-lp path]	Generates a report to a local directory
	-r [-rp path] [-sh host] [-sp port] [-su username] [-sp password]	Generates a report to a remote directory over SSH with password
	-r [-rp path] [-sh host] [-sp port] [-su username] [-sk privkeypath]	Generates a report to a remote directory over SSH with private key
dnresxlang	json_path -ac -l language -c culture [-c culture2] [-c culture3]...	Adds cultures to an existing language
	json_path -ai -l language -is locid locstr [-is locid2 locstr2] [-is locid3 locstr3]...	Adds localizations and their strings to an existing language
	json_path -al -l language -c culture [-c culture2] [-c culture3]...	Adds a language with specified cultures
	json_path -dc -l language -c culture [-c culture2] [-c culture3]...	Deletes cultures from a specific language
	json_path -di -l language -i locid[-i locid2] [-i locid3]...	Deletes localizations from a specific language
	json_path -dl -l language	Deletes a language
	json_path -ec -l language -c culture [-c culture2] [-c culture3]...	Replaces a list of cultures with specified cultures
	json_path -ei -l language -is locid locstr [-is locid2 locstr2] [-is locid3 locstr3]...	Edits existing localizations for new strings
	json_path -r [-l language]	Generates a report for a specific language or for all languages
	json_path -s -rp resx_path	Saves all languages and converts them for use with .NET projects

The dnresxlang action only supports .NET projects. You can find the JSON structure of a language file here.

Git-specific actions

Action	Usage	Description
tags		Lists tags for the whole repo
branches		Lists checked-out branches
commits		Lists commits in the current branch
status		Lists status of the local repo
revert	commit	Creates a commit that reverts a commit
commit	-s summary -t type [-b body] [-a attributes] [-i --assistant model] [-c commit]	Creates a conventional commit with summary and type
push	[-r remote]	Pushes commits to either the current remote or a specific remote
reset	commit	Resets to a commit
hardclean		Forces destructive removal of untracked files, even ignored ones (executes git clean -xdf)

In order to be able to use Git-specific actions, you'll have to clone ADT as submodule in your repository after initializing it. You may need to use the git command directly in some situations.

You can pass -v to any ADT command to enable verbose output, and you can pass --nobanner to prevent showing version information.

To be able to use other tools, you'll have to either install dependencies from your system package manager outlined in the requirements.txt file, or you'll have to use pip install -r tools/requirements.txt to install the required dependencies. You can learn more about requirements.txt here.