@cats-cradle/create-artifact NPM

@cats-cradle/create-artifact

create-artifact is a tool for bundling a single package into an artifact. It was designed to help create small fast deployable projects.

How it Works

create-artifact creates a copy of the workspace, replaces any dynamic package.json workspace:* references with the actual versions, and compresses the project as a ZIP file.

Note In CI/CD pipelines make sure to publish each workspace dependency prior to services that use it being deployed.

Usage

Example in RushJS

For each project that needs an artifact, add create-artifact as a dev dependency:

# example of how to add dev dependency in RushJS
rush add --package @cats-cradle/create-artifact --dev

Add a script command to bundle your package to the project's package.json. Make sure to replace my-package-name with the name of your package.

{
  "name": "my-package-name",
  "scripts": {
    "artifact": "create-artifact my-package-name"
  }
}

Run the script to bundle the project.

rushx artifact

Opinions

Originally, our RushJS monorepo CI/CD process started in Github CI and next went to AWS CodePipeline, Although it was quicker to get a mirror of the repository in AWS CodeCommit and trigger a CodePipeline build from pushes to main, that approach had several costly drawbacks:

In order for a pipeline to build from that source it must clone the entire monorepo within CodePipeline.
RushJS diffs to determine which projects changed are based on git histories. This meant the clone had to be a deep fetch (had to download all git histories) to work, which is an even larger file.
A step that built all applicable projects and download the dependencies was required.
It exponentially increases the amount of downloading and processing that needs to be done within a CodePipeline. This in turn can create prolonged contract variations between microservices when deploying multi service changes, which can cause system errors.
This exponentially increases disaster recovery time, as pipelines take longer to ship code.

Instead create-artifact was favored. It enables for a single dedicated Github CI build stage to individually bundle, compress each project changed (along with workspace and non-workspace dependencies), and put the compress object in a S3 bucket. A CodePipeline is then triggered on each object put to deploy the project. This prevents the need for a CodePipeline to fetch and process large amounts of code and drastically speeds up CI/CD pipelines, allowing engineers to ship code faster.