Code Build

Overview

Code Build is AWS build service. It provides compute resources to compile, run unit tests and to produce your artifacts. This service runs for an AWS Region.

Core Concepts

You start creating a Build Project, in it you specify which and where is the Source code . Currently it supports S3, CodeCommit, GitHub (public and enterprise) and BitBucket. Each source has to specify one branch.

The Build project has an Environment, it determines the base image and the IAM Service Role that is going to be used. An environment can also have Environment Variables that can be consumed during the build, certificates, compute type specification and VPC connectivity configuration.

The build logs can be configured to use both CloudWatch and S3.

A build's Artifact can be published to a S3 Bucket.

You can generate Notification based on the Build State Events (Failed, Succeeded,...) this can send notifications to a SNS Topic, Slack or Microsoft Teams.

A buildspec file needs to be provided by the source or in the Build Project. It specifies the commands to be executed during the build phases. There are 4 phases:

install: Installing packages in the build environment
pre_build: Install build dependencies
build: Run the build steps
post_build: Generate or publish artifacts generated in build phase

The buildspec file can also specify environment variables or retrieve values from the Parameter Store or Secrets Manager.

Everytime you run the build project, it generates a log in the Build History. You can start the build manually, create Build Triggers to run with a frequency or integrate with CodePipeline.