Colby Peck - Gateware Week 16: GTemplates Gets a Pipeline Too!

You get a pipeline! And you get a pipeline! You ALL get a pipeline!!!

My big task this week was to set up a pipeline for GTemplates. If you aren’t aware, GTemplates is a repo that contains a few template projects that use Gateware to make a few different windows. We have one for each of our graphics APIs (DirectX11, DirectX12, OpenGL, Vulkan, and GBlitter for 2D), as well as one for a console application. The pipeline’s job is simple: whenever a new version of Gateware is released, grab that version of Gateware and compile all of the templates with it. 

The first step of this task was to make a script that finds and makes all of the cmake projects in the repo. Well, to make three scripts - one for windows, one for mac, and one for linux. That part was actually not so bad. I got the scripts made and working with little issue. They aren’t set up to work with cmake projects that contain subdirectories (that is, subdirectories that contain their own cmakelist.txt files that are included in a root cmakelists.txt), but none of the templates have those, so it’s not a problem for now. It’s something I’ll be fixing soon, hopefully.

After that, I just needed to make a compile job for each of the templates. Well, a job for each template for each platform it’s supposed to run on. Well, two for each template for each platform - one debug, and one release.

The GTemplates Pipline

As you can see, it actually added up to quite a few. Fortunately, the jobs are all similar enough that I was able to copy/paste them with only minor changes between them:

The Windows compile job for BlueScreen

The Windows compile job for GreenScreen

And, as always, when the pipeline was added it shook out a few bugs. Some of the templates were failing to compile on linux because Gateware was expecting C++ 17 but not getting it. I fixed that by adding it to their respective cmake files (they all got a “set CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD 17” and a “set CMAKE_STANDARD_REQUIRED ON”), and that fixed the issue. Apparently, the source code is supposed to be checking for that already, but clearly isn’t (at least not on linux). More work for the future!

Aside from the two development tasks I’ve mentioned, I’m also working on writing fairly extensive documentation on the gitlab pipeline. It’s a bit of a monster! It’s responsible for testing, compiling, re-testing, and releasing Gateware automatically (as well as testing the templates now), and it’s spread across four repos. I’m doing what I can to try and make future CI/CD work on Gateware easier, but writing documentation (and blog posts) is actually fairly difficult for me to focus on! I often find it easier to read and write code than english…