ARES: Automatic Release Service

This paper presents the Automatic RElease Service (ARES) developed by the Industrial Controls and Safety systems group at CERN. ARES provides tools and techniques to fully automate the software release procedure. The service replaces release mechanisms, which in some cases were cumbersome and error prone, by an automated procedure where the software release and publication is completed with a few mouse clicks. ARES allows optimizing the time and the work to be performed by developers in order to carry out a new release. Consequently, this enables more frequent releases and therefore a quicker reaction to user requests. The service uses standard technologies (Jenkins, Nexus, Maven, Drupal, MongoDB) to checkout, build, package and deploy software components to different repositories (Nexus, EDMS), as well as the final publication to Drupal web sites.