Saturday 6 October 2012

Circle CI and Haskell

This was going to be a long post on how to set up CI and Haskell.  Thankfully I found a simpler way.

One of the most essential parts of Continuous Integration is to have a self-testing automated build.

A CI server (such as Jenkins or TeamCity) aims to simplify this procedure .  Events on the version control system (such as a git push) trigger the CI server which performs a build of the code and runs the automated test suite.   Unfortunately, in my experience, it's always a pain to set these servers up, especially if you aren't using a standard curly brace language.

Circle CI promises one-click automated continuous integration from code pulled from your git repository.  It sounded too good to be true, and initially it was, there way no out of the box support for Haskell.  However, my e-mail to support was quickly answered and the latest version of the Haskell platform was installed and available a few days later (awesome support).

Once the Haskell platform was installed it took me literally 3 minutes to get a working build.


Each server that runs the process is a standard Ubuntu 12.04 and has the Haskell platform installed.  This makes it dead simple to install any extra libraries and then run the necessary cabal commands to configure and run the tests (I used the exitcode-stdio package to run the tests).

Being able to setup CI in a few minutes is really useful and takes a large part of the drudgery away.  Awesome sauce.

I hadn't realized that GitHub had an API for hooks.  As someone who's really interested in dev-tooling, there's a million and one useful ideas that come out from them.  I'd love to see more tools like this (e.g. static analysis, security vulnerability, fuzz testing, bench-marking, profiling, memory checking, code metrics and so on).