Custom Distribution Service : Midterm Summary
Hello, After an eventful community bonding period we finally entered into the coding phase. This blog post will summarize the work done till the midterm of the coding phases i.e. week 6. If some of the topics here require a more detailed explanation, I will write a separate blog post. These blogs posts will not have a very defined format but would cover all of the user stories or features implemented.
Project Summary
The main idea behind the project is to build a customizable jenkins distribution service that could be used to build tailor-made jenkins distributions. The service would provide users with a simple interface to select the configurations they want to build the instance with eg: plugins, authorization matrices etc. Furthermore it would include a section for sharing community created distros so that users can find and download already built jenkins war/configuration files to use out of the box.
Details
I have written separate blog posts for every week in GSoC and the intricate details for each of them can be found at their respective blog pages. I am including a summary for every phase supported with the respective links.
Community Bonding
This year GSoC had a longer community bonding than any of the previous editions due to the Coronavirus pandemic and therefore this gave me a lot of time to explore, so I spent it by building a prototype for my project. I realised some of the blockages I might face early on, and therefore it gave me more clarity in terms of how I can proceed. I also spent this time preparing a design document which you can find here.
Week 1
In week one, I spent time getting used to the tech stack I would be using, I was pretty familiar with Spring Boot but React was something I was going to be using for the first time, so I spent time studying more about it. I also got the project page ready, the issues I was going to tackle and the milestones that I had to achieve before the evaluation. I also spent a bit of time setting up the home page and a bit of front-end components.
Week 2
Once we were done with the initial setup, it was time to work on the core of the project. In the second week, I worked on generating the package configuration and the plugin list dummy display page setup. I also ran into issues with the Jenkinsfile so the majority of time was spent fixing it. Finally I managed to get around those problems. You can read more about it in the Week 2 Blog post.
Week 3
The last week was spent cleaning up most of the code and getting the remaining milestones in. This was probably the hardest part of phase 1 because it involved connecting the front and back end of the project.You can read more about it here.
Getting the Code
The Custom Distribution Service was created from scratch during GSoC and can be found here on Github.