Scrolls

The Automated Delivery Report Engine

What and why?

Scrolls is a highly extensible tool for generating rich release notes or delivery reports combining tangible data from several sources. It's a tool that let's you pull data from many different sources and present it in reports of different formats. It has a number of built in adapters for different data sources e.g. Git, Subversion, Github, Jira, Jenkins and SonarQube and can easily be extended with plugins.

Scrolls purpose is to support the principles of Continuous Delivery by providing traceability and transparency in the delivery process. It gives you the ability to take fast and informed decisions while delivering quality software at speed. Stop spending countless hours in status report meetings or running around collecting information about who did what and why? to be able to decide if the system is releasable or not!

Install

Configure

Run

Scrolls' main interface is its configuration file and its command line interface (CLI). The basic concept is that plugins (i.e. services) are configured in the configuration file and runtime options are given to the CLI.

Developers can run using gradle:

    gradle run -Drun.args="--old-version 1.0.0 --new-version 2.0.0"

Using Scrolls with multiple repositories

Scrolls also supports report generation over multipe repositories. This is a typical scenario when you have dependencies components that need to to be syncronized in a coordinated release. In this case you can view the version of the system as a set of components unique versions. The unique combination of versioned components compose a unique version of the entire system. The format for specifying a multi repo version is JSON:

{
    "name": "scrolls",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "repos": {
        "scrolls-core": {"name": "scrolls-core", "version": "1.0.0"},
        "scrolls-api": {"name": "scrolls-api", "version": "1.0.0"}
    }
}

Use the --multirepo (-m) option to tell scrolls to process the version input as multiple repositories. You can reference the json as files:

    scrolls --multirepo --old-version file://version-1.0.0.json --new-version file://version-1.0.1.json

Plugins

Plugins are built by implementing the ScrollsPlugin interface and configuring them in the configuration file. Scrolls ships with a few standard plugins to be usable out of the box. Currently, Git support is provided by the GitPlugin which knows how to pull data from a git repository. Plugins are allowed to depend on input from other plugins, it's up to the plugin author to make sure the plugin works with the input it will receive (and to inform the user of the required input).

Reports

Reports are based on FreeMarker templates with a default report layout provided (HTML). Users are free to override the global template, the stylesheet or individual templates (there's one individual template per plugin). Overrides work by using the --templates option. Specify a directory and place your own .ftl files in this directory, naming them to indicate which template you want to override.

• scrolls-html.ftl for the main/global template
• scrolls-css.ftl to override the stylesheet used
• <pluginname>.ftl to override a plugin template (e.g. git.ftl or github.ftl)