Hudson server for Sophie 2.0

First steps

Hudson monitors executions of repeated jobs, such as building a software project or jobs run by cron. Among those things, current Hudson focuses on the following two jobs:

• Building/testing software projects continuously, just like CruiseControl or DamageControl. In a nutshell, Hudson provides an easy-to-use so-called continuous integration system, making it easier for developers to integrate changes to the project, and making it easier for users to obtain a fresh build. The automated, continuous build increases the productivity.
• Monitoring executions of externally-run jobs, such as cron jobs and procmail jobs, even those that are run on a remote machine. For example, with cron, all you receive is regular e-mails that capture the output, and it is up to you to look at them diligently and notice when it broke. Hudson keeps those outputs and makes it easy for you to notice when something is wrong.

There are really good tutorials and articles in the Hudson site: ​http://hudson.gotdns.com/wiki/display/HUDSON/Meet+Hudson. If you are more interested in using Hudson(may be not only for Sophie 2.0 project) you should read them and get into the details.

Building Sophie 2.0

• Our Hudson is deployed and is running on http://sophie2.org:8080/. Everyone of us can login with her/his SVN account and then can execute builds of the Sophie project.
• When you go to the server page you can see the last project build with status circle, weather report, last failure, last success and last duration information. There is a Legend link where the status circles and weather report icons are described clearly.
• All Hudson configurations can be seen when you click on the Manage Hudson menu link on the write.
  • If you want to add more Hudson plugins you should go to the manage plugins page and see the available and installed ones.
  • If you want to see all the users you can go to manage users. There is a link at the top of the page where you can see the just made commits and the names of their corresponding commiters.
  • Prepare for shutdown option is really important if you install some plugin and it requires the restart of the server. First you should click on prepare for shutdown so the configurations are safely saved and then you can restart the server(from the sophie2 machine executing hudson.sh stop in /home/build folder)
• When you click on the Build history menu you can see all sophie modules built with various information as build circle, build date and the very useful one - console output. The reason of the unstable builds can be too many test failures for example.
  • For each module there is a page with link to the its files, recent changes, test results and links to various builds.
  • You can build each one of the modules separately clicking on Build now when you are at the module page.
  • You can also configure them separately using Configure option where you can write module descrptions, set maven goals, etc.
• Back to dashboard returns to the executed job(sophie 2 build in our case)
• Clicking on the project you can see information for the whole project building - test and warning trends, test failures, recent changes, ...
  • Build now from here start building the whole project.
  • Here you can see the link to our Trac system.
  • Compiler warnings gives more information about the warnings for each package and class
  • Clicking on each build link gives you the change to tag the build, see its console output, see its dependencies(not working for now) and again the status and changes.
• There is a search box at the top which works only for Hudson stuff(for example you can write configuration which redirects you to the configuration system option).

Comments

• The first steps paragraph is too unclear and doesn't say much - simpler words and shorter description would do better. You should structure the second part better - seems a bit chaotic. Entering config, not configuration redirects you to the configuration page. --boyan@2009-01-12
• This tutorial is rather administrator-oriented, I guess.. most of the users do not have the appropriate rights. --kyli@2009-02-17