Published: Feb 10, 2021 by
Towards the end of last year I started working on a project in rust that would listen to a message queue and send an email. Additionally it used rocket to expose some diagnostic endpoints to check on the health of the service, change log levels, etc. When starting new projects I default to setting up a build pipeline for them to. For this project I setup pipelines in teamcity which was overall pretty easy, but sharing here for anybody else that may go down this path.
cargo-make
For new projects I like to capture the build, admin and CI steps in a way that makes it convenient for others to run on their local machine. Make and it’s derivatives (cmake, cake, etc) provide a useful task abstraction and Rust has the powerful cargo-make project that lets us capture task and mix together inline simple commands with scripts, dependencies etc.
For this project you can find my cargo make file here. I also experimented with using Powershell for my scripts/wrappers. I’ve been using this in my day job where our projects run on Win, macOS and Linux. Overall I’m pretty happy with the experience, but it is another tool to install and maintain along with various platforms missing support.
cargo test
Rust comes with a build tool and test runner built in via cargo. Running test is easy out of the box, but I needed to make use of a couple tools to get the cargo test output into a format that a CI tool parses. I ended getting test and coverage data in the junit and lcov formats that way various tools and platforms can be used across time and projects.
Teamcity
With those tools orchestrated via cargo make it’s time to setup the build and test steps in Teamcity. Overall the process was pretty easy, but I ran into a couple bumps I’ll highlight.
- The cargo step doesn’t support custom commands, so I don’t use that by default
- I wrote CI.ps1 as a wrapper to use in each step.
- Enable the xml-report-plugin And with those two things the pipeline is ready to go. From there you may want to add your own environment variables, plugin, agent deps etc.
Next steps
With this pipeline up an running the next steps are:
- Setup build caching with something like sccache
- Work on local and CI build times
- This has been written about a number of times I would need to make both of these better before taking the project further. As the project grows these would only get worse, and make the project unpleasant for others to work on.
Done
That’s it for now. I learned a lot along the way about Rust, cargo, and hooking it up with Teamcity. I’m not sure I’ll have a write up on artemis anytime soon. It was a good project, but I ultimately took another path. Hopefully this helps somebody, and as always feel free to reach out.