Enable CI/CD in ServiceNow Development

[Boris Moers1]

CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) is used heavily in professional application development these days, but there is no such thing in ServiceNow out-of-the-box.

The difference between 'classic' software development and the way it works in ServiceNow is how changes are captured. In ServiceNow that's the job of an 'update set' or a 'scoped application' - the others just use GIT for that.

So how difficult must it be to extract all code inside an 'update set' into a GIT repo and send it to a CICD pipeline?

Actually not very....

Over the last year I have developed an open source CICD server for ServiceNow to allow to send update-sets or applications through a CICD pipeline with standard tools.

It automates code quality checks, code documentation, ATF test execution and deployment. Just these tings you need to to have to bring transparency in place.

Here is an example implementation of it which works with GitHub
https://github.com/bmoers/sn-cicd-example-v3

The core project can be found here
https://github.com/bmoers/sn-cicd

The project will also be presented at Knowledge19 in Vegas on Tues, May 7, at 10:30 am 

CCB0248 – "Take CICD for ServiceNow to the next level"

See you there!

[Rajiv13]

Here is a link to the presentation that was given last year in K18. Please give it a read, hopefully it can trigger excitement and at the same time provide context to the topic

ServiceNow Development Adopts the DevOps Movement

[lss123]

Hi, I watched the K18 presentation.  Looks awesome.  Does this work for update sets in the global scope as well as application scopes?  If so, how do you get the entire global scope in the trunk/master branch?

[Boris Moers1]

We also use it internally in the global scope. It in fact only needs an update set to run.

For new projects/apps we use the "global scoped app feature", for legacy applications we have implemented a custom grouping which is similar to scopes.

If you want to use it for exiting applications and moving them to a global scoped app is not an option then you'd have to come up with a similar "grouping" feature. And in your implementation of the CICD server the functions commented out here must be implemented https://github.com/bmoers/sn-cicd-example-v3/blob/master/cicd.js#L225

[Ravish Shetty]

Hello Boris and Rajeev,

we are exploring the option to use the CI/CD server created by you (thank you very much for making it open source). We were curious about how GIT can do a comparison between different workflow versions for a particular workflow?

I understand that workflow as a whole is stored in multiple tables as data with transition, activity, etc, all kinds of information.

Ravish