Ask HN: What are the best web build and deploy automation tools? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the best web build and deploy automation tools?

12 pointsteapot017 comments

Grunt.js vs Gulp seem to be the main contenders. And why is it that on stack share, very few of the big guys use them in their stack?

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Are you referring to continuous integration? Cont delivery? Just stacks? If you're referring to some platforms..

CircleCI http://circleci.com as a continuous integration and deployment platform - they automate the build, test, and deploy process.

LaunchDarkly http://launchdarkly.com if you're looking to feature flag your builds and automate rollouts.

Gradle http://gradle.org is an open source build automation system that builds upon the concepts of Apache Ant and Apache Maven and introduces a Groovy-based domain-specific language (DSL) instead of the XML form used by Apache Maven of declaring the project configuration.

You can use Polyglot-Maven [1] with Maven if you want to use a programming language syntax atop the XML. Polyglot-Maven enables not only Groovy, but also Ruby, Clojure, or Scala to be used with Maven.

[1] https://github.com/takari/polyglot-maven

I've been using Deploybot for my hobby project and it's been sufficient. Sufficient enough that I'm upgrading to the Basic plan as my needs expand to more repositories. I do think it's lacking a per-repo payment option, though - it would be great to be able to scale your payment with your actual usage with a sort of AWS-style scaling service vs buying repository allocation in bulk.

I like Jenkins, but I haven't used many others.

Good ol' NPM scripts. Grunt/Gulp/Gradle are completely unnecessary for most cases.

As a library author, supporting every 'flavor of the month' build tool is a waste of time/effort that takes away from improving the core.

JSPM. Like NPM but for client-side dependencies. It has built-in transpiling, es6-module support, and can build+minify bundles and sfx bundles.

Have a look at https://travis-ci.org

Webpack is getting very popular, especially in the React community.

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