In this blog post, I will be giving a behind-the-scenes overview of the new deployment system we have created and been using throughout the development of TSM4.
Why did we create this new deployment system?
The primary goal of all this was to make it quicker and easier for us to get new changes into the hands of our users, and give us the ability to control which sets of users get which changes. Let’s talk about the latter goal first. We currently split our users into 4 separate release channels: Internal, TSM4 Alpha, TSM4 Beta, and TSM3 Release. The ‘Internal’ channel is used primarily for TSM team members for testing the very latest changes. The ‘TSM4 Alpha’ channel was used during the invite-only alpha phase of TSM4. The ‘TSM4 Beta’ channel is currently being used for everybody who has access to the TSM4 beta. The ‘TSM3 Release’ channel is one which all of our users have access to, and gives all of our users access to the latest version (of TSM3) we push to Curse. These release channels can easily be changed and adapted as our needs change (i.e. as TSM4 goes from internal-only to alpha to beta to release). So, the goal of our deployment system is to make it as easy as possible to release new versions to the proper channel.
How do we do this?
We currently use Bitbucket to host our source code repositories. In the past year, they added a new Bitbucket Pipelines feature, which is a build and deployment system. Because we already use Bitbucket tools so extensively, and Bitbucket Pipelines integrates nicely with the features we already use, we decided to utilize it for our deployment system.
Whenever there is a new change made to our TSM4 code branch and we want to release a new version to our beta testers, we simply hit a few buttons within our Bitbucket repository to start a deployment. The details of what happens as part of this deployment is entirely custom. In the case of the TSM addon, this involves taking a snapshot of the current code, removing our internal files which we don’t want to be included in the release, writing the version to the correct addon files, and packing it up into a .zip. This .zip file is then stored on our server for the app to download and marked as the latest version for the appropriate channels.
Future Plans
Once TSM4 is released, this deployment system potentially allows us to do more regular, staged releases. For example, we can release new version to a smaller set of beta testers to ensure there are no critical errors before releasing it to our entire user-base. In the end, this means that we can get more high-quality releases out to our users on a regular basis with less administrative effort on our end.