# Overview

BrainLab-CI (BLCI) is a code and data management continuous integration
tool that provides the ability to perform collaborative, community
experiments with data-quality controls and full provenance. BLCI
autonomously determines code base dependencies and provides infrastructure
to build and manage dependencies between code and data.

## Functionality
BLCI provides the ability to:

- Create dependency-aware pipelines that track code and data dependencies;
performing autonomous updates when upstream changes occur.
- Define custom **script** actions to read/write and update data when
[`add`](interface.html#add-the-repo) or
[`build`](interface.html#build) actions are performed.
See the [actions page](actions.html) for more information.
- *TODO:* Define **verification** actions used to ensure either:
	1. Code pushed to repo is valid for use with data.
	2. Data pushed to repo is valid for use with code.
- *TODO:* Visualize the effects of pushed code and data to the repo via dashboards.
- *TODO:* Autonomously perform **trigger** actions that read/write and update data in response to code changes.

## Compatibility and Support

We support modern Linux and Mac operating systems and provide documentation
with these in mind. BLCI (theoretically) can also run in Windows environments,
but, we do not provide Windows specific documentation. We suggest Windows
users take advantage of virtualization environments such as
[VirtualBox](https://www.virtualbox.org/), [VMWare](http://www.vmware.com/) to
obtain Linux environments.

## BLCI software stack

![infrastructure](../img/architecture.png)

BLCI is built on the shoulders of the following systems and software:
[Git](https://git-scm.com/) for local version control.
[Github](https://github.com/) for remote version control.
[Travis](https://travis-ci.org/) for a continuous integration environment.

## How to **not** use BLCI

*Disclaimer:* Currently BLCI is **not** meant to be used as the primary development repo for a project. It should be used in conjunction with a
primary repo where users can apply changes to the git history freely.
Currently *git commits* performed independently of BLCI result in
undefined behavior.