Code Climate Engine Lifecycle

Code Climate engines go through the following stages:

In Development - the engine is in local development and QA
Beta - the engine is selectively available on codeclimate.com, and in final QA
Generally Available - the engine is available on codeclimate.com, in the Code Climate CLI, and on Code Climate Enterprise

In development

Once you have started working on a Code Climate engine, your first milestone toward getting it out into the world is completing the following steps to get it to Beta. During this process you’ll create your tool, connect with the community of developers building on top of the Code Climate platform, and become intimately familiar with the inner workings of an engine.

Getting from In Development to Beta

Join the Code Climate Developer Program
Read the Engine Specification
Begin development on your engine - our Introductory Blog Post and Documentation are great places to start
Copy the Engine QA spreadsheet
QA your engine with the CLI, completing the engine.json, Dockerfile, Docker Image, CLI Behavior, and Engine Output sections
Submit your engine via the Engine Submission Form
Submit updates to the engine to the Code Climate Engine Update form

Beta

At this point you have an engine which runs locally with the Code Climate CLI, passes the relevant QA steps, and can successfully produce results on 10 Open Source repositories on GitHub. You have completed Quality Assurance and are confident that other people will be able to run your engine against their code.

Code Climate will now begin internal QA of your engine. The QA process involves making sure that the engine is well-behaved in our codeclimate.com cluster, has high quality content associated with issues, and more. Once this QA is complete, we will be able to make your engine selectively available on codeclimate.com for you to test on some repositories.

Getting from Beta to Generally Available

Test your engine on codeclimate.com with the Engine QA spreadsheet, completing the .com behavior section
Provide documentation for codeclimate.com - use the template at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tsIoZz3VBdjg8z6EycA66wFDKVch__4n94GhEooziqU/edit (see https://github.com/sleekbyte/codeclimate-tailor/wiki for an example)
Provide an author image, engine logo, and description for the Code Climate engines page (see http://codeclimate.com/engines for the type of content we need)
Submit updates to the engine to the Code Climate Engine Update form

Generally Available

Once QA is complete on codeclimate.com and the documentation ready, it’s time to make the engine generally available! The answer to “When can my engine get released?” is somewhat dependant on internal activity at Code Climate, but we will do our best to release your engine in a timely manner. Check the status in the engine portal for updates, and email or Slack us if you have any questions.

The next step will be announcing your engine, which you can do yourself any time after the engine has been published on our Plugins page.

On our side, we’ll publish your information on our engines page, mention it in our Changelog, and include it in our roundups of engine activity!

Any Code Climate user can now use your engine via the CLI, codeclimate.com, or Code Climate Enterprise
Submit updates to the engine to the Code Climate Engine Update form