How we automated our Angular updates

Published at 2019-05-21 by Bjorn 'Bjeaurn'

How we keep our developers actively involved with the ever-changing world around our own development.

This article was written with the help of Jan-Hendrik Kuperus and Nathan Perdijk.

Upgrading your Angular applications is quite easy with the Angular CLI. We have been faithfully upgrading to major releases usually within a week of release, without hesitation or issues since Angular 4.

This process has been delightful. You get a compile error with some breaking changes and maybe there’s some manual work to be done, but other than that, it’s been quite effortless and easy to maintain.

So much so, that we have automated our Angular upgrade process using our CI solution.

How we did it

We have 5 steps in our CI pipeline. For our example we used Jenkins, but there’s no reason this wouldn’t work with any other CI pipeline.

Our 5 steps consist of:

• Git checkout, workspace cleanup and creating a new branch.
• Using the Angular CLI to run our updates.
• If the updates cannot be applied automatically, or there were no updates available; we send a message to our communication platform of choice.