The Symphony Software Foundation provides a service-based infrastructure to support project teams throughout the entire project lifecycle.

The infrastructure is divided into these primary areas:

Below are reported some important concepts to help reading the infrastructure documentation.

Concepts

Building and testing

The build is an end-to-end process that converts source code into reusable artifacts, something that we will refer to as deployable units, which is developed by the project team and hosted in the github repository. It is a particularly important task, as it can centralise and trigger several automated sub-tasks, such as version control, code testing, quality and compliance reports and more.

A working build process is key to implement more automated processes, such as release, Continuous Integration and automated deployments; it is also a requirement for project activation.

To know more about build configuration, check the Languages page.

Version control

Version control is the process to establish a format to a project version and the rules to update it, preferably integrating with automated build and release systems; the Foundation mandates the user of Semantic Versioning ("semver") throughout a project's lifecycle:

• for incubating projects, it is allowed to deploy releases with version numbers < 1.0.0
• for active projects, it is allowed to deploy releases with version 1.0.0 and above

Every project team is encouraged to define more specific MAJOR, MINOR and PATCH definitions, in order to provide a better understanding for consumers on what to expect when adopted; for those ecosystems that support more complex version number representations (e.g. Python), the Foundation strongly recommends restricting version numbers to semver format wherever possible.

Release

The release process allows to publish deployable units into a publicly available artifact repository, by invoking the build process and applying version control to increment the project's version; the Foundation collects guides and best practices on how to release a project, depending on the language and eco-system of choice; browse the Languages page to know more about automated configurations for a given language.