Introduction
Local build is a unique feature of pulse™ that allows you to execute the pulse™ build engine outside of the pulse™ server. The most common use case involves executing the engine in a local checkout of your project's source code. This functionality is not intended to replace your existing method of building your project from the command line. Pulse is not a build tool (like Ant or make) nor is it designed to be. Rather, local build should be used on top of your existing build scripts.
Purpose
The primary purposes of the local build feature are to assist:
- Configuration of pulse™ projects: when writing a pulse file by hand, it is convenient to be able to run the build locally rather than submit the file to your SCM and schedule a build. This allows you to capture errors more quickly, and to tweak custom settings such as post-processing regular expressions.
- Debugging build failures: sometimes when a build fails on your pulse™ server you may have difficulty reproducing the problem on your development machine. Using local build, you can replicate the exact steps used by the pulse™ server to execute the build. This increases the likelihood of reproducing the problem.
Local build is not, however, restricted to these uses. As the entire functionality available to pulse files may be executed using local build, you may find additional use cases.
Overview
The remainder of this document is divided into the following sections:
