Jelastic Version Control Enhancements

Jelastic, the self-scaling Java and PHP cloud hosting platform, was recently updated to 1.9.2 for all Layershift customers. Jelastic 1.9.2 includes many new features, advancements and visible changes that make it easier to develop and deploy applications.

 Source Control Management (SCM) or Version Control Systems (VCS) are a developers second best friend (their best friend being the Jelastic platform itself of course!), so we’re going to focus on those platform enhancements in this blog post.

• Git submodule support

• Automatic check and update feature (optional)

• SVN and Git update logs

Jelastic now supports Git submodules

Many Git users will be familiar with the power submodules provide – particularly if your projects incorporate common libraries such as SwiftMailer or UtilityPHP. Submodules give a simple way to add that code to your project as a link to the parent repository, so if SwiftMailer gets a security update or bug fix, that will find its way into your project too without needing to think about it.

Git submodules help you keep external libraries cleanly separated from your own code. Although generally a great feature, submodules can be quite difficult to work with from the command line. Unfortunately, this causes a lot of people to avoid them.

Don’t worry. We’ve made it really simple in Jelastic. Here’s what you need to do:

Nothing!

If your Git repository contains submodules, we’ll automatically include them in the next pull request you make from the dashboard, and we’ll also automatically update them on each subsequent request.

The beauty of this feature is that it’s up to you to decide when you should (or shouldn’t) use submodules. Whether you use submodules in your repository or not, you don’t need to do anything different at the Jelastic side – we figure it out and handle it appropriately in either case. Either way Jelastic makes life really easy for you.

SVN and Git Automatic deployment

You may be familiar with commit hooks in your particular repository tool of choice. However, there’s a good chance that when you took a look you found them a little bit confusing and unnecessarily complex – it probably put you off trying to implement your particular custom behaviours.

Jelastic solves this problem with a universal implementation that suits SVN and Git users needs at once. You can now set Jelastic to periodically poll your repository for changes; if found, Jelastic will automatically deploy them to your environment.

No configuration is needed at the repository side. Simply set the number of minutes you want to wait between checks, and Jelastic takes care of it all for you.

Perfect for staging or demo environments where you always want the latest code to be published, but do not want the added complexity of a full continuous integration suite.

Improved visibility with the VCS update log

The new VCS update log provides improved visibility over the checkout / pull process, so you can verify what’s happening and identify any errors or conflicts much more easily. All VCS (Git / SVN) update requests are logged to the vcs_update.log file (available in the dashboard).

Log entries are conveniently time stamped to help you identify the entries you’re interested in, and verify when the next auto-update will run. For example, if you edit a file manually via the dashboard, you will have trouble with your next checkout – this log file shows the checkout error so that you can resolve it.

All of these features are available to existing users right now. Try them out and share your feedback – we’d love to know what you think!