Good Reference for Hudson/Maven/Mercurial Integration - maven

Can anyone provide a good reference (web, book etc.) that explains how to set up Hudson to do builds/releases using Maven/Nexus and Mercurial? I would like to set up our system to do Maven builds in Hudson based on updates to our Mercurial SCM projects which are automatically deployed to our local Nexus server. Some of the project are dependent on others. I can find quite a few references that refer to one part of the equation, but haven't found anything that details all the pieces together.
TIA!!
EDIT
I think what I am looking for initially is more of a general overview of how to use these tools in an integrated manner. And then I can delve into the details. What I'm looking for is how to use Hudson to do/verify builds and based on the results, push the artifacts to the appropriate Maven/Nexus repository (snapshot or not) and also possibly deploy applications from Hudson as well to our pre-prod systems. The fact that I'm using Mercurial is incidental.
Hopefully that clarified and didn't muddy my question...

I don't know about the books, I did our integration by using Hudson help.
I think, though, that one area is totally not clear out of the box: providing your own version of settings.xml ( that's where you may set custom repository, profiles, etc )
Here are the steps:
Go to Hudson->Manage Hudson->Maven 3 Configuration
Under 'Documents' tab click 'Add'
Change 'Type' drop-down to 'SETTINGS'
Give it a meningful name ( e.g. my-custom-settings )
Cut and paste the WHOLE xml that you would usually put into $HOME/.m2/settings.xml
Hit 'Save' button at the bottom of the screen.
Now you are ready to setup Maven project
Create new job and tie it to your source control
Add 'Invoke Maven 3' build step
Click 'Advanced' button
In expanded list find 'Settings' drop down
Choose 'my-custom-settings'.
With custom settings you can provide deploy credentials, custom profiles, etc.
I really wish Hudson team would have provided similar instructions in their help for Maven build step, instead of links to 'Settings Reference' at maven.apache.org website.
As for mercurial integration, quick search returned this article -> http://www.ashlux.com/wordpress/2010/06/16/triggering-hudson-builds-with-mercurial-hooks/
I am not mercurial expert, but the article is consistent with the setup we used for our SCM integration.

I wrote a blog which talks about setting up project using Jenkins and maven, If i am right Jenkins is a spin off from Hudson. Try it out it might help
http://prasannatalakanti.blogspot.com/2011/08/continuous-integration-using-open.html

Related

How to configure VS solution to use tfs vnext build with release management

Q. How can I setup our config/transforms to get release management to work in the example way?
I'm trying to get release management to work in the way all the videos seem to show. The same build progressing through environments going through build --> Dev/Staging --> Production.
It's making me step back a little and question the way we do our configurations in Visual Studio solutions (and our git flow branch process). I think the way we use the configurations is making things more difficult further down the line with the build and then release.
Configurations
We currently use the two default configurations, debug & release.
We tend to use the debug build on our Dev (contains the dev database
connection string & other app settings transforms). This is what we deploy to 'dev'.
Then we also have the release configuration with the production transforms in. This is what we deploy to 'Production'.
How can I setup our config/transforms to get release management to work in the example way?
One option: Build both configurations. Publish both configurations as artifacts in your build.
In your release definition, deploy the appropriate configuration from the linked artifacts.
Another option: Don't do compile-time configuration transforms and instead do deployment-time configuration.
What you provide in the screenshot is a Overview of releases. Which is used to track a release in Microsoft Release Management. Based on a release name and links.
The Overview page shows a list of release definitions. Each one is shown as a series of environments, with the name of the release and the date or time it was started. The color of the heading and the icon in each environment indicate the current status of the release. The color scheme is the same as in the Releases page.
You just need to follow the provided starter deployment templates or you can also create your own templates for your project.
Back to the screenshot, there are just the environments in a release build definition. You can add the need environment in the definitions.
After that you will view the same thing in the overview just like the example:
For your situation, you can created two separate release definition with two build definition based on the both configurations. Moreover,there has been a very detailed document in MSDN, including setup, configurations, manage release, deploy, you can have a systematic understanding.

Intellij does not displays repos on auto complete drop down

I am new to maven and I wanted to try it out and I decided to choose Intellij IDEA IDE for this task.
I tried to follow few video tutorial to create simple spring project with maven. But I happen to notice that, while creating dependency on pom.xml file I could not get auto complete for packages that are present on .m2 directory inside my user home directory.
But I can see two item in autocomplete dropdown, one being the self project and other maven-clean-plugin for artifactId
I could not come up with any solution for this. May be this will not affect my development, but I got stuck with this issue and wanted to know what really happened.
I am more than happy to clear myself further if what I am asking is unclear :)
When auto-completing maven dependencies, IDEA uses an index it generates to know what dependencies are available. Go into Settings (Ctrl+Alt+S / ⌘,) > Build, Execution, Deployment > Build Tools > Maven > Repositories. Your local repository should be listed. Select it and click Update for IDEA to update the index on it. It will take a bit of time. The progress will show on the center-right of the bottom status bar of the main IDEA window. If you use a repository manager, like Sonatype's Nexus, you should add it in the "Artifactory or Nexus Service URLs" section in the lower pane. Maven central will also likely be shown. You should update its index as well.
Click the Help button on that settings dialog for more information.

Publish a specific revision using CruiseControl.Net

I am setting up a CruiseControl.Net server. So far, it only builds a project (.Net website), and I kind-of know how to set up unit testing, code coverage, etc in the future.
What I will need to have soon is this:
The developers commit changes to SVN continually, thus CCNet builds often.
CCNet will publish the latest version to the development server, as soon as a commit is validated (with unit tests etc).
The project manager validates a specific version, in order to publish it to the pre-production server, and create a SVN tag from this revision.
The last point is where my problem lies: how exactly can I set up things so the project manager can, for instance, browse to the CCNet web dashboard, select a previous specific build, and says "this is the build I want to publish" ?
I believe that my thinking is flawed somewhere, but I can't put my finger on it. Maybe CCNet is not the right place to do these manipulations ?
In my mind, I can create a SVN tag using CCNet, and mostly work from the trunk, but maybe I can't ? Maybe it's the other way around, and I should add a CCNet project every time a tag is created under SVN ?
The final goal is that I want to automate the publication process: zip creation (for archiving), web.config modification (using Nant for instance), and website publication (using FTP).
In all these steps, I want to limit the manual intervention to the maximum. If I can avoid to add a new project to CCNet every time a tag or branch is created in SVN, that would be awesome.
Thanks for your help, and sorry if it's not very easy to read, but it's not very clear in my head either...
Since you can create any task, you should be able to achieve the goal, though unfortunately not out-of-the-box.
Since you use SVN, it all depends actually on revision. I think I'd create a separate project for your third scenario and added a parameter where PM would provide revision number. Then based on that I'd tag sources etc. in my own task.
Regarding the other points, I think this is similar. Recently for web projects we started using MSDeploy, and in each stage build the MSDeploy package was created. Then there was a separate build called Deploy, that when forced allows us to select which package we want to deploy using MSDeploy.
Having several environments, however, started a little bit like overkill for managing with CCNet, and I'll be looking into kwakee at some time.

is it bad form to have your continuous integration system commit to a repository

I have recently been charged with building out our "software infrastructure" and so I am putting together a continuous integration server.
After a build completes would it be considered bad form for the CI system to check in some of the artifacts it creates into a tag so that it can be fetched easily later (or if the build breaks you can more easily recreate the problem.)
For the record we use SVN and BuildMaster (free edition) here.
This is more of a best practices question rather than a how-to question. (It is pretty easy to do with BuildMaster)
Seth
If you believe this approach would be beneficial to you, go ahead and do it. As long as you maintain a clear trace of what source code was used to build each artifact, you'll be fine.
You should keep this artifact repository separated from the source code repository.
It is however a little odd to use a source code repository for this - these are typically used for things that will change, something your artifacts most definitely should not.
Source code repositories are also often used in a context where you want to check out "everything", for example the entire trunk. With artifacts you are typically looking for a specific version, and checking out all of the would only be done if exporting them to some other medium.
There are several artifact repositories specialized for this, for example Artifactory or Apache Archiva, but a properly backed up file server will thought-through access settings might be a simple and good-enough solution.
I would say it's a smell to check in binaries as a tag. Your build artifacts should be associated with a particular build version in your build system, and that build should be associated with a particular checkin. You should be able to recreate the exact source code from that information. If what you're looking for is a one-stop-function to open the precise source-code revision that generated the broken build, I'd suggest that you invest some time into building a Powershell module that will do that for you.
Something with a signature like:
OpenBuild -projectName "some project name" -buildNumber "some build number"

TeamCity users: a few questions

These questions are for TeamCity users only
1) Is it possible to configure TeamCity to extract build artifact information based on your own your regular expressions? This is exactly what Pulse does here
2) Does TeamCity integrate with any task/bug tracking tool? like JIRA?
3) This question is for people who run static code analyzer only. A tool like PC-Lint/Visual Lint can generate XML reports. Can TeamCity be configured to parse these artifacts and generate a build failure?
4) I'm currently evaluating TeamCity right now...there community forum doesnt seem to be very active. For those who pay for support, how is Jetbrains support? Is it good? Atlassian seems to be much better.
TeamCity allows to get build artifacts with a Ant-based pattern. You can specify multiple patterns and set target directory for each pattern. Read more at http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/TCD4/Build+Artifact
There is an integration which allows to link RF-3432 to the Jira issue. More advanced integration may appear in the next release of TC. Read more at http://www.jetbrains.net/confluence/display/TCD4/Mapping+External+Links+in+Comments
Only with custom plugin. Or your build process can send a specific "echo" message which will change build status and description.
OK, I'm JetBrainer. May be we don't response immediately, but we strive to answer forum questions ASAP. Paid customers also have e-mail support.
Hope this helps,
KIR
Disclaimer: I don't work for JetBrains! But I've worked with Pulse and TeamCity in my current job.
Build Artifacts: Yes, TeamCity will export artifacts that remain after a build. You can add define ant-style wildcard patterns to match files (the default pattern matches any files left in the root build directory). These files can be seen from the project view against each individual build.
You can use special service commands in a build script to immediately export artifacts along the way too, I do this for a code complexity tool that generates xml files, for which I've also defined a custom graph.
Bug Tracking: I don't have experience with this, but KIR pointed out some alternatives.
XML Parsing: You can control this with ant. I included a third-party tool called andariel in my build that can run XPaths across xml documents, then used service messages to export the result (in this case a count of methods exceeding a complexity limit) to be displayed in a custom graph.
I believe you could also publish the artifacts, provide TeamCity with an XSL to render the XML, and create an additional tab in your build results to display it (however I have not done this)
Tech Support: I've found the community forums to be pretty good, most questions I've had answered within a day or two by both civilians and Jetbrains employees, and I was using the free 'Professional' version.
I can only imagine that email support will be just as good if not better!
I am a little confused about this question because my use of TeamCity, TC (and I guess the design principles of TC) is to allow the build script (and not TC) to remain the correspondent of build imperatives.
In other words, if you need TeamCity to do something cool, just add that cool stuff in your build script either using an existing task in your build system or write one yourself.
TeamCity supports NAnt, MSBuild, Ant and am sure, any other build platform you can install on on the buildagents.
The only integration I will want TC or any other CI platform to have is source control integration with my choice of SC. The rest of the integration should be controlled by my build script. That way, I only configure my TC once at the beginning of project for each project and then, don't touch it ever again. In contrast, the build can change per version.
So, the indirect answer to your question is Yes, theoretically, through the build script.
Hope this helps.

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