Automated build/release tools

Victor has been working on some really cool automated build and release tools. They can be set up on a CRON task to build the latest nightlies by checking out from SVN, and posting them automatically to the website. What this means though is that we would need a snippet that reads the contents of a directory and outputs the files and MD5 checksums that are there. It also builds the kickstart installer so the user would only need to download a little 3KB file to install MODx.

It also does release builds as well. Generates MD5 checksums and so on. We could even have it commit the build as a copy to the releases branch as well so that is automated.

Thanks Victor ... very nice stuff indeed!

Very nice

We need to also create a page that we can use from within the manager to supply information about available (stable) updates directly into the Content Manager. From this location the would be notified when updates are available and give them the option to download and install them.

Secure would have to be added to make sure that the user is downloading the content from a trusted site.

This system would also be used to generate security alerts

Totally agree. Victor’s code should be usable to morph into this since it’s creating directories and moving things around.

I am extremely nervous about the security implications of this code, but in reality it’s not any different from the user download a zip file from our site. After all we’re expecting that there’s no man-in-the-middle attack going on, against which we’re powerless anyway. And we’re also expecting that the code on our site has not been tampered with at all.

Anyway, since I am not a PHP programmer by any stretch of the imagination, I’d appreciate someone with more PHP experience taking a look at the installer and offer up some suggestions for it

Victor