I am looking to make my development life a little easier. Currently I have to go through multiple steps to deploy my code base to a test environment to allow for QA to do their work. These steps are not difficult just that I want to automate it so that it can auto run twice a day.
One thing that I am having trouble figuring out what to do is to automate my build artifacts phase in IntelliJ. I have two modules in my IntelliJ projects and I build artifacts for one of them.
The steps I go to build the artifacts are
Build --> Build artifacts --> Select Artifact to build
I was wondering if something like Ant would be able to do the job? I am not familiar with Ant, so I thought I was ask people opinions on it first.
Ant can do what you want, but personally I prefer Gradle or Maven to build my projects. You can use them even to deploy your app into test servers. Here's a simple tutorial for you to start learning gradle (my favorite one at the moment)
Usually what I do is have my run/debug also build my artifacts. On the bottom of "Run/Debug Configurations" in Intellij you can add "Build Artifact" to "Before launch: Make, Activate tool window".
You can probably build the artifact with ant by generating build.xml through Menu --> Generate Ant Build but would have to keep it updated. Maven or Gradle is a better option in this regard.
Ideally though, you would want a CI tool like Jenkins (there are others) to deploy your code to your environments. So when you push (with your VCS) or trigger it, everything is built by Jenkins and sent to where it needs to be for the QA team.
http://codurance.com/2014/10/03/guide-to-deploying-artifacts-with-jenkins/
