What is software build- All you need to know!
If you are an IT professional who is working with a software development team you will come to know this term “Build” various times.
The software build is a general term in the software development world. The software build is an activity to translate the human-readable source code into an efficient executable program.
It is the process of creating the application binaries for a software release, by taking all the relevant source code files and compile them and then creating a build artifact (such as binaries and executable program, etc.)
Build Process is the combination of several activities that varies for each programming language and operating systems but the basic concept will be the same.
If any developer ‘break the build’ then code does not compile and the product can not ship.
What is the Procedure to build?
- Fetching the code from the source control repository like Github, bitbucket, etc.
- Compile the code and check the dependencies.
- Run the automated unit tests.
- Link the library, files, code, etc accordingly.
- When everything is successfully passed, it’s built an artifact and store.
- Achieve the build logs.
- Send the notification emails to the concerned person.
The above steps are used in the build process. In the software build process, we also need to know about the types of build. Generally, there are two types of builds.
- Full Build
- Incremental Build
Let’s see what is the full build and incremental build.
Full Build
In the full build process we perform the build process from scratch, it treats all the resources of the project never seen by the build server/build tool. It takes the full project as an input, checks the dependencies, compiles all the source files and builds all the parts in order. After that assemble it into build artifact.
Incremental Build
An incremental build uses the ‘last build state’, this last build state is maintained by the build server or build tool. It checks and compares the source files, as well everything that depends on the target. If any dependency has been modified after the target was last built then the target will again rebuild, otherwise, the file from the last build will be reused.
Incremental Builds are faster than the full build and use few resources.
There are various ways to trigger the build like:
- Manual Build Trigger
- Schedule Build Trigger
- Source Code Repository Build Trigger
- Post-Process Build Trigger
We have various build tools which we can use to automate this build process like:
- Make
- Ant
- Maven
- Gradle
- Grunt etc.
With the help of the above build tools, you can automate the complete build process and it will save your time.
I will cover the topics of build automation tools in my future posts. :)
