We have seen that build runners can be very handy. Even though most build runners can be replaced with an equivalent command using the command-line runner, build runners come with the convenience of easily setting up build steps, along with the necessary agent requirements and parameters.
Meta-Runners provide a straightforward way to create custom build runners. Meta-Runners can be thought of as a way to avoid duplications in build steps across build configurations.
Note
While templates can be used to create and maintain build configurations that are very similar, Meta-Runners can be used across build configurations that perform the same build steps. Moreover, a build configuration can only be based on one template, but it can make use of multiple Meta-Runners.
In Chapter 3, Getting Your CI Up and Running, we created the deploy-to-test build configuration that deploys the Django application to Heroku. Using this build configuration as an example, we can see how we...