SUSI.AI Android app uses CircleCI to check for tests whenever a new PR is made. This is done to ensure that the app is consistent with the new changes and there is no problem adding that particular code change. CircleCI has now launched a v2 version of the .yml file and therefore to continue using CircleCI it is time to upgrade to v2 version of the script.

Circle.CI config version 1

Config file tells the CI on what commands to run to test the build, which will determine if the build is successful or failed like tests, lints etc and hooks commands to run if the tests pass, which environment to run the code in – python, java, android, etc.

Circle.CI published that 31, August 2018 is the last date upto when they will support the config version 1.0, therefore it Circle.CI was updated to version 2.0.

The version 2.0 has an updated syntax of the script and previous script was modified so that it could provide the configuration for the CI builds.

The updated script is shown below :

version: 2 jobs: build:   working_directory: ~/code   docker:     – image: circleci/android:api-27-alpha   environment:     JVM_OPTS: -Xmx3200m   steps:     – checkout     – restore_cache:         key: jars-{{ checksum “build.gradle” }}-{{ checksum  “app/build.gradle” }}     – run:         name: Download Dependencies         command: ./gradlew androidDependencies     – save_cache:         paths:           – ~/.gradle         key: jars-{{ checksum “build.gradle” }}-{{ checksum  “app/build.gradle” }}     – run:         name: lint check         command: ./gradlew lint     – run:         name: Run Tests         command: ./gradlew build     – run:         command:           bash exec/prep-key.sh           bash exec/apk-gen.sh     – store_artifacts:         path: app/build/reports         destination: reports     – store_artifacts:         path: app/build/outputs         destination: outputs     – store_test_results:         path: app/build/test-results

Few checks such as the connectedCheck, which were required for the UI testing, are not included in this script and instead an approach towards the increasing number of unit tests is followed. The reason being, implementing UI tests is a hard task for apps which have no constant designs and have constantly changing specifications. Since the architecture used is MVP, so on moving all logic to presenter components there won’t be a need of most UI tests at all. This problem with UI tests will further increase in future. Therefore, moving in the direction of increasing unit tests is better because they are both easy, small and quick to code and run and the degree of dependence on flaky UI tests also decreases.

If the view is implementing small sections of display logic, just verifying that the presenter calls those is enough to guarantee that the UI is going to work.

The command in the previous config such as

./gradlew connectedCheck

was removed and instead ./gradlew build was added to start the unit tests instead, also due to the updated gradle dependencies, changes were made to the apk uploading commands and also changes were performed in the apk-gen.sh file.

bash exec/prep-key.sh chmod +x exec/apk-gen.sh ./exec/apk-gen.sh

In the above code, lines concerned with apk-gen.sh can be combined and the resultant command was written as :

bash exec/apk-gen.sh

The apk-gen.sh script was configured and the latest build tools were added to make the script work.

REFERENCES

Continuous Integration – Martin Fowler:

https://martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html

Circle CI version 2.0 for android :

https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/configuration-reference/#run

Circle CI configuration reference :

https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/configuration-reference/