Using Castle Game Engine with any CI

In general, using any CI system to build your Castle Game Engine application means that you get inside your CI environment:

Your application (usually, the latest version from code repository like GIT).
And Castle Game Engine (usually, a tag like snapshot or v7.0-alpha.3).
And a compiler, like FPC.

Then you use our build tool to build and test your application. Execute the same commands you would execute from the command-line. Usually start with the command castle-engine package (builds and packages your application for current system). Once you have this working, extend it — build for all platforms you care about, release the build to users, run tests, and so on.

How to get FPC and CGE inside the CI job

You can use Castle Game Engine Docker image. Most CI systems have integrated support for Docker.

Advantages: Our Docker image provides ready FPC with a few cross-compilers. You can build applications for Linux, Windows and Android out-of-the-box. Detailed list of supported targets (OS/CPU) is on the Docker image page.

Disadvantages:
- You cannot build for certain systems, like macOS, from our Docker image.
- Our Docker images require a considerable disk space.
- If you need to execute Windows-specific or macOS-specific tools, it’s hard or impossible. Inside the Docker, you have the full power of a Linux environment. To execute Windows tools (like Inno Setup), it’s best to just execute within a normal Windows machine instead.
castle-build-ci scripts.

This gets our recommended FPC version and then downloads CGE. Optionally it can also install Lazarus.

Advantages: You can build for all the systems where the engine can be used, including macOS. You setup FPC and CGE on your target system, you can run all the auto-tests on that system, and execute any system-specific tools to package your application.

Disadvantage: You need to actually have a machine with the target OS to build for it. E.g. to build for macOS, you need a macOS machine. You can also use a GitHub-hosted or GitLab-hosted runners (smaller versions of them are available for free).
Other approaches are also possible.
- You could install FPC using apt-get install fpc on Linux (and equivalent on other platforms, e.g. brew install fpc on macOS, choco install lazarus on Windows to get Lazarus from Chocolatey).
  
  Make sure that the runner packages have recent enough FPC version, see supported FPC versions.
- Specifically with GitHub Actions, you can use setup-lazarus action to install FPC and Lazarus.
- You can download our FPC builds directly.
- You can get CGE by just git clone of our repository and compiling our build tool from source using ./castle-engine_compile.sh. You can essentially follow a super-minimal version of compiling from source docs to do that, you only need to compile the build tool, which can then build your project. Our scripts in castle-build-ci can be used as a reference, they do exactly that — but it’s not that hard to do it yourself from scratch :)

To improve this documentation just edit this page and create a pull request to cge-www repository.