Introduction to Build Tools

▪ Application needs to be deployed on a production server

▪ For that, we want to package the application into a single moveable file (artifact), also called “building the code”

▪ This is what a build tool or package manager tool does

What is an “artifact”?

▪ Includes application code and all its dependencies.

What does “building the code” mean?

▪ Compiling the code

▪ Compressing the code

▪ Package hundred of files to 1 single file

• keep artifact in storage

• to deploy in multiple times have backup

dev test production

What is an “artifact repository”?

▪ The storage where we keep the artifacts.

▪ To deploy it multiple times, have backup etc. For example, if we deploy the artifact to development server, then we are going to deploy this artifact on test env and maybe later on production env. Or if the dev server crash, we can deploy it again from backup.

▪ Examples: Nexus, Jfrog Artifactory

Artifact files look different for each programming language