Zarro

What is this?

Standing on the shoulders of giants, zarro is a zero- or low-conf orchestration for (primarily) dotnet/.NET build and test (eg at CI), but it's also so much more - since it's easy to add your own tasks, you can use zarro for whatever you like, but if you're looking for CI build / test / coverage* for dotnet/.NET, this might be what you're looking for.

(* coverage works well for NUnit / .NET Framework, but I haven't found a nice process for dotnet core - yet)

Why not just use msbuild?

Zarro wraps msbuild, using gulp orchestration under the hood. It does, however, take away the pain of:

• knowing where msbuild lives (since it consumes gulp-msbuild
• being able to use a specific version of msbuild (again, thanks to gulp-msbuild)
• running tests via dotnet test or via the NUnit CLI runner, as appropriate
• running coverage reporting (.NET Framework) via OpenCover
• downloading local variants of tooling required for the above so that your CI server doesn't have to have them installed, or kept up to date
  • note: zarro will not download msbuild tooling, but should work fine with any installed version of:
    • VS Community / Professional / Enterprise
    • VS Build Tools
    • dotnet sdk (dotnet kindly adds itself to the path)
• packing nuget packages, either from .nuspecs (.NET Framework) or directly from the .csproj (dotnet core)

Fine, but I can do all of that with a batch file?

Perhaps (though the msbuild discovery is a bit of a PITA, especially since Microsoft likes to keep us on our toes, mixing up exactly where that's installed to, eg in vs2019. The real win comes from:

• out of the box, on a simple-ish repo, zarro should be able to build and test, as long as you use the naming convention of {Assembly}.Tests for test projects (though it will also find Test.{Assembly} and an ubiquitous Tests assembluy)
• it's easy to add more tasks to your pipeline for further processing
• use the gulp orchestration framework to extend or override available tasks

Which gulp? 3 or 4? They don't play well together!

Zarro has you covered here. The heart of Zarro was originally built for gulp 3. Version 4 came out and broke everything. I didn't feel like rewriting perfectly acceptable tasks, but I did want to keep up with the latest version of gulp and the speed advantages that were promised. As such, Zarro can consume and adapt gulp 3 tasks to run under gulp 4.

Getting started

1. npm init -y (if you don't already have a package.json
2. npm install --save-dev zarro
3. start adding scripts! for example:

   "scripts": {
      "build": "zarro @",
      "test": "zarro @",
      "zarro": "zarro"
   }

(the test-dotnet task should invoke zarro's inbuilt build task (and some earlier ones to download tooling, as required) so that when test-time comes, assemblies are already built (required for .NET Framework / NUnit runner, and optimised for dotnet by performing the build and testing without rebuild)).

Add new custom tasks by invoking zarro --create-task to guide you through the process. This will create a skeleton task file for you under local-tasks with some of the boiler-plating already done.

What's in the box

Direct invocations

command-line switch	action
--create-task	guids you through creating a new local task written in typescript
--help	shows how to use zarro
--init	adds a "zarro" npm script to make zarro invocations easier
--show-env	shows the observed environment variables and what tasks they affect
--tasks	lists the task tree (built-in and yours

Built-in tasks

There are an array of pre-defined tasks you get out of the box with zarro. I hope to eventually provide more documentation for them, but running zarro --tasks should tell you something similar to:

• help
  • shows help / usage
• help:environment
  • shows help about environment variables zarro observes (same as running with --help)
• build
  • attempts to build all found .net solutions
• test-dotnet
  • test .net projects based on conventions
    • test project names should match *.Tests or *.Test or plain old Tests
    • assumes test are nunit
• cover-dotnet
  • test with coverage
  • can use dotCover or OpenCover
• generate-reports
  • generate html reports from OpenCover results
• default-tools-installer
  • installs the default helper tooling from nuget
    • nunit cli
    • dotCover
    • OpenCover
    • ReportGenerator
• install-tools
  • called before build
  • defaults to install default tools
  • override with an empty task if not useful
• dotnet-publish
  • runs dotnet cli build with publish options
• nuget-restor
  • restores nuget packages
  • run automatically as part of build
• release-npm
  • perform guided release of npm packages
  • can do beta releases
  • will automatically
    • increment version
    • git commit
    • git tag
    • git push
• update-self
  • updates to zarro@latest
• update-git-submodules
  • updates all git submodules in the repo
• pretest
  • place-holder: override this to run something before testing
• verify-up-to-date
  • verifies that the current branch is up-to-date with the main one
    • will check against {remote}/{main branch} if possible

Zarro doesn't do what I want out of the box

Zarro is designed to be zero- to low- conf. You can guide many aspects of available tasks with environment variables. Running npm run zarro -- --show-env will show you all observed environment variables and where they are applicable. I suggest using cross-env and applying these variables in one place, to keep things simpler. For example, NExpect does the following:

Traditional configuration via environment variables

"scripts": {
    "zarro": "cross-env DOTNET_CORE=1 BUILD_EXCLUDE=src/PeanutButter/**/* PACK_INCLUDE=* PACK_EXCLUDE=*Tests*,CoreConsumer,src/PeanutButter/**/* TEST_EXCLUDE=src/PeanutButter/**/* zarro",
    "build": "run-s \"zarro build\"",
    "test": "run-s \"zarro test-dotnet\""
}

in the above:

• DOTNET_CORE=1 instructs zarro to use dotnet instead of searching for msbuild
• BUILD_EXCLUDE=... instructs zarro to exclude everything under that folder, recursively (NExpect imports PeanutButter as a submodule to use some shared code without relying on another package dependency)
• similarly TEST_EXCLUDE excludes PeanutButter tests
• similarly, PACK_INCLUDE and PACK_EXCLUDE control nuget packing within NExpect

Updated configuration

Zarro will automatically create a .zarro-defaults next to your package.json if it is not found. In here, we can add key-value-pairs of environment variables to set when running zarro. These values will be overridden by any existing environment variables, so if you need to override a variable which is set on the hosting system, you should use cross-env as above. However, for many situations, specifying environment variables in .zarro-defaults makes npm script setup a lot easier. For example, if we use .zarro-defaults, we can modify the example above:

Update package.json with:

"scripts": {
  "build": "zarro @",
  "test": "zarro test-dotnet"
}

Update .zarro-defaults to contain:

DOTNET_CORE=1
BUILD_EXCLUDE=src/PeanutButter/**/*
PACK_INCLUDE=*
PACK_EXCLUDE=*Tests*,CoreConsumer,src/PeanutButter/**/*
TEST_EXCLUDE=src/PeanutButter/**/*

Note also here the shorthand of @ - if a task has the same name as the npm script used to invoke it, this is a quick way to surface that task to npm run -space.

Custom tasks

Zarro will also search two folders:

• local-tasks
• override-tasks in the root of your repo, for extra tasks that you can access from your npm scripts.

These can be brand-new functionality you'd like to add to your repo's build system, or you can override existing tasks, if they don't suit you. For example, if the pack task doesn't do exactly what you want, copy pack.js from node_modules/zarro/gulp-tasks into your local-tasks folder and modify it to suit you. If you find a generic solution to the problem you have which others might find useful or fix a bug, I'd like to know about it. PRs for fixes and extension tasks which others could use will be appreciated.

Examples of custom tasks that I've written in the past

• a watcher to automatically recompile scss to .css
• orchestration of build / test of sub-projects that aren't .NET
• automatic version incrementing of packages before release
• committing, tagging and pushing new changes to GitHub
  • I've found that writing a meta task called release can make it much less painful to perform a release of my nuget packages, for example. This meta task would:
    • build
    • test
    • increment package versions
    • pack
    • push packages
    • commit the updates package definitions
    • tag the release
    • push the tag and changes to GitHub

API

Zarro provides some convenience functionality from baked-in modules. To access a module, the global requireModule function will resolve the correct location for you. Modules live under the gulp-tasks/modules folder. Most modules will return a single function, though there are some exceptions. Some modules may be of interest to custom tasks, eg:

• gulp
  • you should requireModule("gulp") wherever you would have normally done require("gulp"). This gets you the patched version of gulp 4 which will happily consume gulp 3 tasks and which has inbuilt support for help for your tasks on both gulp 3 and 4. Most importantly, if you do not use this export, your tasks may not be correctly registered.
• env
  • provides a utility object to resolve environment variables for you
    • register can register an environment variable as known with a default value and help. See register-environment-variables.ts for examples. When you use this function, you can have a central configuration for a default value for an environment variable and your environment variable will be displayed in the --show-env output
    • resolve resolves environment variables for you. It can be invoked with one or more variable names, so can be used to fall back from one variable onto another. It will also resolve back values if registered.
    • associate associates one or more variables with one or more tasks, primarily to show which tasks are affected by which variables when running with --show-env
    • resolveArray can resolve an environment variable to an array for you, with an optional delimiter parameter, which defaults to comma
    • resolveNumber resolves a numeric value from the named environment value or throws if the value can't be resolved as a number, effectively stopping execution. If you're expecting a number (eg port or max thread count) you can simply resolveNumber and an invalid value would cause execution to stop with a reasonable message
    • resolveFlag resolves boolean values from environment variables
      • true for: "yes", "true" or "1"
      • false for: "no", "false" or "0"
      • throws for unknown values
• system
  • function to run other process and get back stdio results from said processes
• resolve-masks
  • single function to resolve an array of masks that could be used in a gulp.src where those masks can be inclusive or exclusive
• find-local-nuget
  • provides a single function to find a locally-downloaded nuget.exe, automatically downloading it if required. Use this if you need to use nuget.exe operations and don't want to set up your build host with a pathed nuget.exe
• git utilities
  • git-tag
  • git-push
  • git-push-tags
• string padding
  • pad
  • pad-left
  • pad-right

There are many more utilities in there, feel free to browse the source.

History

If you've made it thus far, some light history might be of interest. Zarro's core functionality comes from another repo of mine: gulp-tasks which was traditionally consumed as a git submodule. However, it seems that a lot of people don't really "get" git submodules:

• people forget (or don't understand that they need to) git submodule update --init after a git clone or a git pull. Some modern git clients are doing this for the user, but not all of them.
• people don't seem to understand how submodules are stored (literally just a hash and an url), so they don't pay attention when committing them. In particular, I have seen my fair share of inadvertent "submodule wars" where changes upstream aren't applied after a pull (ie, people forget to run git submodule update --init), then they re-commit back the old version of the module that they have locally. So fixes tend to become unfixed
• in addition, gulp-tasks requires dependencies to be installed in the hosting repo's package.json, meaning that (a) the hosting repo has to "know too much" about the requirements of gulp-tasks and (b) upstream changes may require changes to a repo's package.json (and an npm install). Whilst this was (eventually) automated as part of gulp-tasks, it seems unnecessarily complex.
• the solution seemed clear: make gulp-tasks available via an npm package
• the name is inspired from the old bugzilla, which would proudly proclaim "zarro boogs" when there were zero bug matches for a query, because (a) names are hard and (b) zarro aims to be zero- to low-conf