On these days I am working on big system that is built on several components: a couple of websites, some backend services and several shared libraries. At this moment all these components are stored in the same Subversion repository. As you can image, this is a huge repository. At the same time, the system is already running in production mode and some components are being updated/replaced. Because of this situation and in order to simplify configuration management I being working on designing a new configuration management strategy. The solution I have in mind includes 3 key tools:

• Git: to store source code, in particular I like GitHub service
• NuGet: a package manager for .NET components (for those not familiar with .NET, it is like a Maven in Java o npm in Node). We know we will need a private Gallery for some components, but we still don’t decide if  we are going to host our own instance or if we will use a cloud service.
• Jenkins: to provide continuous integration and deployment automation

Now I will try to explain how these components fit together.

Each shared library has its own Git repository. In case a library depends on third party component, it should declare the dependency package.xml for Nuget to download the dependency at build time. At the same time, stable versions of share libraries are published in NuGet Gallery (possible a private one).

Each application has its own Git repository. In case an application depends on third party component, it should declare the dependency in package.xml for Nuget to download the dependency at build time. In case this application depends on a  private share library there two options:

• If the shared library will be used as it is, then it is managed with NuGet
• If the shared library needs to be modified, then the shared library repository is added as a submodule of the application repository. This way you will be able to add the shared library project to your Visual Studio solution and will be able to modify it.

At the same time, Jenkins will monitor all repositories and trigger a CI job to compile and run automated tests on each change. For each application there will be additional Jenkins Jobs to perform deployments to the different environments. For each shared library, there will be a Jenkins job to publish the library to the NuGet repository.