Exploring IBM Bluemix – Part 4: Git & DevOps
By now you should be more or less familiar with deploying your IBM Bluemix applications by using Cloud Foundry. This article will show you how to use Git to deploy your application instead, in order to hopefully avoid the mysterious CF command line.
Click on Start Coding on the left panel of your Bluemix application page, and select GIT:
Simply follow the instructions on the page to get started. Click on ADD GIT on the application overview page:
Follow the hints to create the Git repository. Make sure that the checkbox Populate the repository with the starter application package and enable Delivery Pipeline (Build & Deploy) is selected. When done you will receive an email containing two links, the project URL on DevOps and the Git repository URL. By visiting the project URL you will be able to invite more people to collaborate on the project:
Take note that it may take a while from the moment you receive the email until the project page is ready. If you visit the page too early, you may receive some cryptic error message. In my case, a {“name”:”TypeError”} error is displayed:
Once the project page is ready, you will be offered three methods to edit your code, besides the usual method of editing and uploading from the Cloud Foundry client:
- Using the DevOps Web IDE
- Using the Rational Team Concert client for Eclipse
- Using a third party client
The rest of this article will show you how to use the DevOps Web IDE to edit and deploy your code. Click on the Edit Code button on your project DevOps page:
Now edit the files on the Web IDE as you would on a normal IDE. Some syntax highlighting is supported, although there seems to be no auto-complete or error checking:
You can also use a third party Git client such as SourceTree to clone, edit and push the changes to the repository as needed, When you are ready to deploy, click on the Git Repository link on the left menu and select the changed files you wish to deploy:
When done, click on the Build & Deploy button on the top right menu to deploy your changes. Once completed, you should be able to see the changes reflected on your application home page.
Similar to using Cloud Foundry command line, the process will take about five minutes to complete. I would therefore say that using Git and DevOps to deploy your project does not really make things faster, other than the added version control functionalities provided by Git. You will still need to select the files that are changed, push and commit changes before you can deploy your project. This seems to be a longer process compared with just using the cf push command for each deployment. And while the Web IDE user interface looks nice, crucial features like auto complete, syntax error detection, or project-wide text search are missing, making it troublesome to use the Web IDE for anything more than minor changes. I would therefore hope that IBM would spend some serious efforts to make the entire process more efficient to facilitate day-to-day development tasks.
For now, I will still stick to using CloudFoundry for deployment with PHPStorm, my favourite PHP IDE.
