topic Re: Web AppBuilder in CI/CD Pipelines in ArcGIS Web AppBuilder Questions

Web AppBuilder in CI/CD Pipelines

TimmonsAgsDeveloper02 — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 15:31:44 GMT

How to use ArcGIS Web AppBuilder in CI/CD pipelines.

While having a lot of experience as a developer, my current tasks involve assisting the developers with moving their applications along the CI/CD pipeline, eventually to production. Most are used to the notion / practice of creating on their laptop and deploying from their laptop. And they are not sure what code to commit into our Git repositories.

I'm curious if there is documentation on how to use the AppBuilder tool within a CI/CD pipeline, and how to version control the source (i.e. where are changes stored as you create/save).

Re: Web AppBuilder in CI/CD Pipelines

Brian_Wilson — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 16:55:49 GMT

5 years ago, no replies. I am thinking no one anywhere in the Esri universe uses CI/CD.

Last Friday I updated some services and a cascade of widgets and maps stopped working. I really really want to avoid doing that again. I spent this week cleaning up. First I patched up the broken things then spent a couple days getting back to making the actual improvements.

We don't have a tester on our staff (ha ha ha I'm on a county budget but it would be sweet) and no, I don't have a rigorous check list. I used to work in software shops where we separated build, test, release into separate units and I pine for those days. I am willing to code up a test process but have no time or skill to develop and execute extensive test plans manually.

It is hard to stage releases with Esri. Please send me blog postings or (gag) youtubes or helpful links.

Often OVERWRITE is the only path forward Esri provides to us. And it's hard to do OVERWRITE and then OOPS UNDO that!! For me UNDO would be "restore from a backup wiping out all other work for the day". How does that work when data are scattered across several servers and databases? Neither of these options is satisfactory for me.

I guess we can call what we have the "No turning back" strategy.

So... there are actually several problems to solve here.

1) a process for a test build

2) comprehensive automated test before release

3) systematic automated release process

4) roll back without destroying other work (backup tapes are not the answer)

I guess the 1% of Esri customers who have the money have dedicated staff. Only the other 99% suffer. Not going to change here.

I really want to put "Web App Builder, Dev Edition" behind me and move on the Exp. Builder. Yesterday I found out they used the same stupid deployment process - ZIP as output => Copy -> UNZIP. HELLO ESRI let me introduce you to git! BUT let's leave that out for now. What else do I need to think about? I am erasing my whiteboard now so I can think about all this.

Re: Web AppBuilder in CI/CD Pipelines

LoisLi — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 20:24:17 GMT

Hi guys,

I get the frustration. It's hard to find resources and solutions for Esri's prodcuts. They acutually put up an example here. https://github.com/gavinr-maps/experience-builder-devops-example

It's introduced during a dev summit event. I think dev summit is probably the best place to find useful info on Esri's products.