Keep it Simple - Using a bootstrap script to wrap your build system

Do you know what's annoying when you start at a new company (or do a clean checkout of some code)? Getting your development environment set up; especially when it comes to making sure you have the right software in place to be able to build said code!

I'm sure there are lots of ways to solve these problems, but a simple solution we use at TransFICC is to use a bootstrap script that wraps our build system. This is called everytime you want to run something via the build system (in our case Maven [we haven't buck'd up]), and ensures all build dependencies are present. I should note that we only use this for build dependencies, not run time dependencies.

bootstrap.sh


Our build dependencies are Java, Node (well, npm), Buck, and Maven. This script assumes the dependencies live at http://thearts.internal.transficc.com/artifacts/ (e.g. the jdk is located at http://thearts.internal.transficc.com/artifacts/jdk/jdk1.8.0_74.tar.gz and the directory contained inside the tar.gz is jdk1.8.0_74). The checksums check for a change of dependencies rather than ensuring they are downloaded correctly.

This script could be used as follows.

transficc.sh

./transficc.sh compile