baur

About

baur is an incremental task runner for monolithic Git repositories.
It can be used in CI environments to build, check and test only applications that changed in a commit.

Practical usage examples of baur can be found in the example repository.

How it works

Per application tasks are defined in a TOML configuration file. Each task specifies:

• a command to run,
• which inputs (files) affect the result of the task run
• and optionally outputs that are created when the command is run and where those artifacts are uploaded to.

When baur runs a task, it calculates a digest for the task inputs and stores it in a PostgreSQL database.
On following runs, baur only runs tasks for which the inputs changed.

Key Features

• Running Tasks only for Changed Applications
  Tasks define which inputs affect the result of the task execution.
  baur can only runs tasks that have not been run before for the current set of inputs.
  Inputs can be defined as glob file patterns, environment variables, as strings on the commandline, or as Go package queries.

• Artifact Upload
  Artifacts can be uploaded to S3 buckets, to Docker registries or simply copied to another directory in the filesystem.

• Application Management
  baur can be used as management tool in monorepositories to query basic information about applications and upload destinations for specific builds.

• Optimized for CI
  baur is made to be run in CI environments and supports to output information in the easily-parseable CSV and JSON formats.

• Configuration File Includes
  Tasks, Inputs and Output definitions that are shared between tasks can be defined in include configuration files.

• Templating
  Templating can be used in configuration files.

Quickstart

Installation

From a Release

The recommended way is to download the latest released version from the release page.
Official releases are provided for Linux, macOS and Windows.

After downloading the release archive, extract the baur binary (tar xJf baur-OS_ARCH-VERSION.tar.xz) and move it to your preferred location.

From Source

You can build and install the latest version from the main branch by running:

go install github.com/simplesurance/baur/v5/...@main

Setup

baur uses a PostgreSQL database to record information about past task runs. The quickest way to setup a PostgreSQL for local testing is with docker:

docker run -p 127.0.0.1:5432:5432 -e POSTGRES_DB=baur -e POSTGRES_HOST_AUTH_METHOD=trust postgres:latest

Afterwards you create your baur repository configuration file. In the root directory of your Git repository run:

baur init repo

The command will print instructions how to initialize your database and create your first application configuration file.

First Steps

To show information about the available commands run:

baur --help

Some commands to start with are:

command	action
baur status	List task in the repository with their build status
baur run	Run all tasks of all applications with pending builds, upload their artifacts and records the result
baur ls runs all	List recorded tasks
baur show currency-service	Show information about an application called currency-service
baur ls inputs --digests shop.build	List inputs with their digests of the build task of an application called shop
baur run --help	Show the usage information for the run command.

Documentation

Documentation is available in the wiki.

Upgrading from older baur Versions

See Upgrade Instructions in the wiki

Versioning

baur follows Semantic Versioning for its command line interface, configuration file format and database schema.
The APIs of the Go packages are excluded from the semantic versioning policy. Their APIs may change at any time in a backward incompatible manner.

Contributing

We are happy to receive Pull Requests for baur.
If you like to contribute a non-trivial change, it is recommended to outline the idea before in the Ideas forum.

Contact

• Questions? - Q&A Forum
• Suggestion for a cool feature or other improvements? - Ideas Forum

Links

• Example Repository
• Wiki