Introduction to Build & Package Manager Tools:

• What are built and package manager tools?

  • Let's say a group of developers make an application so it must be available to the end user after the application is ready.

  • So, the App needs to be deployed on a production server.

  • Then the question is how do you deploy your application meaning how do you move your application code and its depend dependencies to the server so it’ll be available to the end users.

  • Package application into a single movable file

  • and this single movable file is called an artifact.

  • packaging = “building the code”

  • Building the code involves:

    • compiling (Hundreds of files into 1 single file)
    • compress (Hundreds of files into 1 single file)
    • after the artifact was built we keep artifacts in storage also
    • In case we need to deploy multiple times, have a backup, etc. for e.g.: If we deploy the artifact on dev server, we deploy test environment, or later on production environment.

Artifact repository:

That storage is where we keep the artifact once we build it is called the artifact repository, an example is Nexus, JFrog Artifactory

What kind of file is in the artifact?

• The artifact file looks different for each programming language
• For example, if you have a Java Application the artifact file will be a JAR or WAR file
• JAR = Java Archive
• includes whole code plus dependencies like:
  • Spring Framework
  • datetime libraries
  • Pdf processing libraries

Install Java and Build tools

• Install java
• Install Maven
• install Node + npm
• Download IntelliJ

How to build the artifact with dependencies?

• Using a Build Tool, so there are special tools to build the artifact
• And these tools are specific to the programming language
  • For Java:
    • There is Maven or Gradle