Introduction

This KB article lists some available tools for continuous integration and automatically deploying the MarkLogic Server

Deployment Options

ml-gradle is a gradle plugin that can be used for configuration and application deployments. Application deployments are maintained as projects, which can deployed to any environment - Development, QA, Production, etc.

The MarkLogic Configuration Management API is a RESTful API that allows retrieving, generating, and applying configurations for MarkLogic clusters, databases, and application servers.

The MarkLogic The Management API is a REST-based API that allows you to administer MarkLogic Server and access MarkLogic Server instrumentation with no provisioning or set-up. You can use the API to perform administrative tasks such as initializing or extending a cluster; creating databases, forests, and App Servers; and managing tiered storage partitions. The API also provides the ability to easily capture detailed information on MarkLogic Server objects and processes, such as hosts, databases, forests, App Servers, groups, transactions, and requests from a wide variety of tools.

The MarkLogic Admin APIs provide a flexible toolkit for creating new and managing existing configurations of MarkLogic Server.

Integration Testing

MarkLogic Unit Test is a testing component that was originally part of the Roxy project. This component enables you to build unit tests that are written in and can test against both XQuery and Server-side JavaScript.

Implementation Specific Tools

CloudFormation Templates

MarkLogic CloudFormation templates enable you to launch clusters with an Elastic Load Balancer, Elastic Block Storage, Auto Scaling Group, and so on. Your cluster can be in either one Availability Zone or three Availability Zones. Multiple nodes can be placed within each Availability Zone. You can choose whether to deploy to an existing VPC, or a new VPC. The templates can also be used with tools like Terraform and Ansible

• Deploying MarkLogic in AWS with Terraform
• Deploying MarkLogic to AWS with Ansible

Python

The MarkLogic Python API aims to provide complete coverage of the capabilities in the MarkLogic REST API in idiomatic Python.

Jenkins

Jenkins is often used with MarkLogic Server for building deployable artifacts, staging build artifacts, running automated tests, and deploying said artifacts. Jenkins has great REST endpoints that make it easy to get / put job configurations, and enable / disable jobs from scripts.

Jenkins provides a driver to the continuous integration / continuous delivery process that can integrate with other tools. In combination with ml-gradle, it can be used to run deploy module/unit test on code check-in.

One pipeline example used with Jenkins is to:

1. Pull the code from Git
2. Deploy to DEV with ml-gradle
3. Run MarkLogic Unit Test
4. Email a report of the success/failure
5. Kick off job to deploy to another environment

Also noted that the most important best practice here would be to make sure Jenkins runs primarily off of a host other than a MarkLogic host.