telegram-bot-bash/doc/7_develop.md

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Notes for bashbot developers

This section is about help and best practices for new bashbot developers. The main focus on is creating new versions of bashbot, not on develop your individual bot. Nevertheless the rules and tools described here can also help you with your bot development.

bashbot development is done on github. If you want to provide fixes or new features fork bashbot on githup and provide changes as pull request on github.

Setup your develop environment

1. install git, install shellcheck
2. setup your environment for UTF-8
3. clone your bashbot fork to a new directory git clone https://github.com/<YOURNAME>/telegram-bot-bash.git, replace <YOURNAME> with your username on github
4. create and change to your develop branch git checkout -b <YOURBRANCH>, replace <YOURBRANCH> with the name you want to name it, e.g. 'develop'
5. give your (dev) fork a new version tag: git tag vx.xx, version must be higher than current version
6. setup github hooks by running dev/install-hooks.sh (optional)

Test, Add, Push changes

A typical bashbot develop loop looks as follow:

1. start developing - change, copy, edit bashbot files ...
2. after changing a bash sript: shellcheck -x scipt.sh
3. dev/all-tests.sh - in case if errors back to 2.
4. dev/git-add.sh - check for changed files, update version string, run git add
5. git commit' -m "COMMIT MESSAGE"; git push

If you setup iyou dev environment with hooks and use the scripts above, versioning, addding and testing is done automatically.

Prepare a new version

After some development it may time to create a new version for the users. a new version can be in sub version upgrade, e.g. for fixes and smaller additions or a new release version for new features. To mark a new version use git tag NEWVERSION and run dev/version.sh to update all version strings.

Usually I start with pre versions and when everything looks good I push out a release candidate (rc) and finally the new version.

 v0.x-devx -> v0.x-prex -> v0.x-rc -> v0.x  ... 0.x+1-dev ...

Versioning

Bashbot is tagged with version numbers. If you start a new development cycle you must tag your fork with a version higher than the current version. E.g. if you fork 'v0.60' the next develop version should tagged as git tag "v0.61-dev" for fixes or git tag "v0.70-dev" for new features.

To get the current version name of your develepment fork run git describe --tags. The output looks like v0.70-dev-6-g3fb7796 where your version tag is followed by the number of commits since you tag your branch and followed by the latest commit hash. see also comments in version.sh

To update the Version Number in your scripts run dev/version.sh, it will update the line '#### $$VERSION$$ ###' in all files to the current version name.

Shellchecking

For a shell script running as a service it's important to be paranoid about quoting, globbing and other common problems. So it's a must to run shellchek on all shell scripts before you commit a change. this is automated by a git hook activated in Setup step 6.

In addition you can run dev/hooks/pre-commit.sh every time you want to shellcheck all files given in 'dev/shellcheck.files'.

bashbot tests

Starting with version 0.70 bashbot has a test suite. To start testsuite run dev/all-tests.sh. all-tests.sh will return 'SUCCESS' only if all tests pass.

enabling / disabling tests

All tests are placed in the directory test. To disable a test remove the x flag from the '*-test.sh' test script, to (re)enable a test make the script executable again.

creating new tests

To create a new test run test/ADD-test-new.sh and answer the questions, afterwards you have the following described files and dirs:

Each test consists of a script script named like p-name-test.sh (where p is test pass 'a-z' and name the name of your test) and an optional dir p-name-test/ (script name minus '.sh') for additional files.

The file ALL-tests.inc.sh must be included from all tests, do not forget the shellcheck source directive to statisfy shellcheck.

Tests with no dependency to other tests will run in pass 'a', tests which need an initialized bahsbot environment must run in pass 'd' or later. If '$1' is present the script is started from 'ALL-tests.sh' and a temporary test environment is setup in directory '$1'. The temporary test environment is created when 'ALL-tests.sh' starts and deleted after all tests are finished.

Example test

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# file: b-example-test.sh

# include common functions and definitions
# shellcheck source=test/ALL-tests.inc.sh
source "./ALL-tests.inc.sh"

if [ -f "bashbot.sh" ]; then
	echo "${SUCCESS} bashbot.sh exist!"
	exit 0
else
	echo "${NOSUCCESS} bashbot.sh missing!"
	exit 1
fi

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$$VERSION$$ v0.70-rc1-0-g8883cc9