People working as Developer, DevOps, or SysOps hear a lot about the build of an application, screams that the build failed, and requests to not break the build all the time. So, what do they mean about the build? The developers write code and push it to a version control system such as GitHub, SVN, or CodeCommit. This source code needs to be analyzed and processed further so that it can be deployed to the production server or platform.

The processing step can be any of the following:

1. Source code usually consists of classes, objects, methods, and functions. So, we have to compile and link them to make it in an installable or binary format.
2. Running test cases or quality analysis on source code means that the source code will pass through the seven axes of code quality--duplication, code coverage, complexity, comments, bugs, unit test, and architecture and design...

When it comes to cloud-hosted and fully managed build services, which compiles our source code, runs unit tests, and produces artifacts that are ready to deploy, then AWS CodeBuild comes into the picture.

Instead of using Jenkins or Bamboo, we can use AWS CodeBuild, and then skip the following issues:

• Setting up a Jenkins on a server and maintaining it
• Maintaining the cluster security
• Upgrading the Jenkins software over time
• Monitoring and recovering from Jenkins downtime
• Capacity planning so the cluster can handle all our build volume

If you setup the build server of your own, then you have to pay a big bill to the engineers to keep the cluster scaled up 24/7 and maintain the Jenkins cluster. If the build server will have any issues, then the team won't be able to ship the latest code, until the build server is fixed.

AWS CodeBuild is elastic...

Maven provides benefits for our build process by employing standard conventions and practices to accelerate our software development cycle and help us to achieve a higher rate of success. We will now see the build of a Maven application.

To play around with the Java application and build it using Maven, we need JDK7/8 and Maven to be installed on our local machine.

In this section, we will be installing Java-8 and verify it:

[root@awsstar ~]# yum install java-1.8.0-openjdk -y 
[root@awsstar ~...

NodeJS, built on Google Chrome's JavaScript engine, is a server-side platform developed by Ryan Dahl in 2009. It is widely used by lots of big enterprises due to its features. So, we will see how we can build the NodeJS application using yarn.

To play around with the NodeJS application and build it using yarn, we need to install NodeJS and a yarn package on our development machine.

[root@awsstar ~]# curl --silent --location https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_6.x | sudo bash -
[root@awsstar...

In the previous section, we saw the brief steps of flow of work in CodeBuild. Now, let's try to build some real application with CodeBuild.

The following are the details that we will be going to use in CodeBuild:

• Source repository: AWS CodeCommit
  • Repository name: CB-MAVEN-Book
• Build environment: AWS CodeBuild
  • Environment image: Image managed by AWS CodeBuild
  • OS: Ubuntu (only OS provided by CodeBuild)
  • Runtime: Java
  • Version...

In the previous recipe, we saw how to build the application using AWS CodeBuild. However, in that case, we used the build commands (mvn install) in the console only, as shown in the following image:

When it comes to the complex scenario, it means we need more than one build commands and need to perform some additional operations in the build environment. For this, we use the buildspec.yml file.

A build spec is a collection of build commands and related settings; in the YAML format, AWS CodeBuild is used to run a build. This file needs to be checked in with the root folder of the application code. This file will possess Build steps as...