However, TeamCity does not provide autobranching of git repository. Since we create a topic branch for every feature / bug / refactoring we do, we want each branch to be green before we code review them.

The only CI server with auto-branching we found was Integrity. It’s pretty much like CI Joe. It’s very simple, it’s also quite buggy but we really missed all the metrics (duration / code coverage / fog results…)

We decided to make a small sinatra app which would copy projects on a CI server for every branch we push too. TeamCity does not provide any REST API so we moved to Hudson. It’s ugly, quite complex, but very easy to setup, damn easy to setup agents (Hudson would connect via ssh to an agent, bootstrap it and run builds) and we get all the metrics back!

Those willing to autobranch on Hudson using Github Post Commit Hook can use this little sinatra app: https://github.com/versapay/hudson-github-autobranch

Well, I think a good protection against destroying production databases is to not have them configured in your version control. Only in a folder in the production environment and capistrano does a symbolic link on each deploy. I believe that we do not need to do that in a production-similar environment. We usually have an approval environment similar to production. Of course it is not fully tested as a CI environment, but we usually approve each feature with our clients. And we only do the deploy when tests pass, so we think that there is no need for an isolated VM for each CI server instance. And of course, since Bundler exists, configuring an Rails environment is dead simple, so we have to be less concerned about environment problems :-).

It’s always worth setting up. Even for such small teams. From my experience I know that people sometimes forget running tests and CI server catches all these situations. And if setting up CI Joe involves almost no effort you have no excuse to not try it 😉

Bonus question – how do you protect against destroying your production databases? 🙂

We actually run all of our PHP tests using cijoe via a github hook. cijoe then posts the results to our Campfire room. Nothing fancy, but it gives our team immediate feedback on our test suite and has caught quite a few issues before they were pushed to production.