I’m setting up a Jenkins server to make builds of my fork of the github repo for the engine. I’d like to have it make a new build of the engine whenever we make changes and make the resulting product available to everyone on our team.
After the build is complete, what files do I need to package up and distribute? For example, should I just zip up the Engine, Samples and Templates folders and tell them to download it?
Also, once they have downloaded the engine, what do they need to do to set it up? Would it just be a matter of unzipping and running UnrealVersionSelector-Win64-Shipping.exe?
It depends on what you’re building and who you’re distributing the build to. Assuming that programmers are going to be using GitHub to pull latest source, I would exclude source code from your package.
You should distribute the Binaries, Plugins, Build, Config, Documentation, Shaders, and Programs directories in full for Engine, Samples, and Templates (code) to your developers. Content/Editor/Slate, Content/EditorKismetResources, and Editor/BlueprintResources from the Engine directory should also be distributed with each new build.
Content is assumed to be grabbed at latest by the content developers throughout a build cycle. If you’re going to distribute content via a zip file, then it would probably be best to just zip up the Engine, Samples, and Templates folders while excluding the Source trees. If you plan to distribute the source as well, then the easy way it just to send it all.
As for setting it up, they would need to run UnrealVersionSelector once to register the engine directory and the shell extensions.
Depends on your workflow. Normally we distribute latest content with our builds. So the assumption would be you don’t package those directories because the developers will be grabbing latest content to be used with the built binaries.
If you don’t plan to have content devs grabbing latest content, then you should package up everything but the source dirs.