Catching up on coding - I've been out of build minutes the past 5-6 days. The counter reset yesterday, so today I've been trying to get back into the coding mindset. I wrote quite a bit of code this past week but didn't have a way to test or deploy it. Now that I'm getting setup to test it all, it's become obvious that I need to refactor some of the plugins to have more tests, to lighten the burden on the website main project.
The thing I'm trying to avoid is running out of build minutes again. The website's npm module cache is great for normal time operation, it saves loads of build minutes, but when the plugins are changing, I effectively have to turn off the cache to get the updates into the website. It's a real hassle, error prone, and wastes loads of build minutes.
So I'm moving what tests I can from the main website repo into the plugin repos. I'm hoping that will make things easier to manage, and save on build minutes, because the plugins have less dependencies. I won't know for sure until it's done, but my huntch is that it will, and it will be better organised in any case.
Of course as I'm doing that I've found that the various plugins were all using their own test fixtures data. I had setup a seperate repo with test data but was only using it in the main website project. As part of the refactor then, I'm going to make sure all the repos use the test data from the same repo, rather than each having their own, possibily inconsistent data.
It takes a bit longer than you expected, which can be frustrating at times, especially when you've been waiting eagerly for what feels like ages to test your latest code. But I'm mostly used to it, and I can see that the setup will be way more robust once this little update is done.
It's the way things often happen with software. #