Benefits

Terrabuild ultimate goal is to ensure the build happens as fast as possible. There are two ways to make it fast:

• do not build what has not changed
• build several projects in batch

Terrabuild does both by leveraging a build cache and batch-building projects together.

Sample workspace

Imagine following projects and dependencies as follow. Projects are managed individually, and each have a dedicated PROJECT.

flowchart LR
  classDef default stroke:black
  classDef root stroke-width:2px
  classDef publish fill:skyblue
  classDef build fill:palegreen
  classDef batch fill:orange

  publishA("publish A\n@dotnet publish\n@docker build\n@docker push") --> buildA("build A\n@dotnet build")
  buildA --> buildC("build C\n@dotnet build")
  buildA --> buildD("build D\n@dotnet build")

  publishB("publish B\n@docker build\n@docker push") --> buildB("build B\n@npm build")

  class publishA,publishB root
  class publishA,publishB publish
  class buildA,buildB,buildC,buildD build

Caching

If a project does not need to be rebuilt, build artifacts are restored and dependants can be built in turn.

Even better: if a branch of the graph does not lead to new artifacts, it can be safely ignored in CI context (this is usually not the case locally where developers needs artifacts).

For eg: if project A, C and D do not change, Terrabuild won’t even bother restoring artifacts since no artifacts are generated in CI.

Batch build

Running small tasks is not efficient: this is why Terrabuild is able to group tasks together to make the build faster. You can focus on how to build project and Terrabuild will focus on optimizing the build graph the best it can transparently.

For instance, @dotnet build tasks can be grouped together - post-build actions must still take place to cache artifacts as required:

flowchart LR
  classDef default stroke:black
  classDef root stroke-width:2px
  classDef publish fill:skyblue
  classDef build fill:palegreen
  classDef batch fill:orange
  classDef optimize stroke-width:2px,stroke-dasharray: 5 2

  publishA("publish A\n@dotnet publish\n@docker build\n@docker push")
  publishA --> buildA("post-build A")
  publishA --> buildC("post-build C")
  publishA --> buildD("post-build D")

  batchBuildACD("batch-build A+C+D\n@dotnet build")
  buildA --> batchBuildACD
  buildC --> batchBuildACD
  buildD --> batchBuildACD

  publishB("publish B\n@docker build\n@docker push") --> buildB("build B\n@npm build")

  class publishA,publishB root
  class publishA,publishB publish
  class buildA,buildB,buildC,buildD build
  class batchBuildACD batch
  class buildA,buildC,buildD,batchBuildACD optimize