I am referred to Hudson today.
I have heard about continuous integration before, but I have no idea what the heck is a ci-server.
Hudson is really easy to install in Ubuntu and in several minutes I managed to set up an instance of it.
But I don't quite understand the workflow of a ci-server, or how am I supposed to use it?
Please tell me if you have experience about ci, thanks in advance.
Edit:
I am currently using Mercurial as my SCM, and I wonder what is the right way to use it with Hudson.
I have installed the Mercurial Plugin of Hudson, and I create a new job with a local repository. When I commit in the repository the Hudson job is built with the latest version of my source code.
If what I used is a remote repository, what's the workflow like?
Is it something like the following?
Set up a Hudson job with the repository
Developer makes a local clone of the repository
Developer commit and push changes
The remote repository update with the incoming changeset
Run a Hudson build
There may be something I misunderstanded at all, please help me point it out.
Continuous Integration is the process of "integrating software" continuously i.e. as frequently as possible (ultimately after each set of changes) to avoid any big-bang integration and all subsequent problems by getting immediate feedback.
To implement Continuous Integration, you first need to automate the build of your software (where build means of course compiling sources, packaging them, but also compiling tests, running the tests, running quality checks, etc, anything that will help to get feedback on the health of your code). Then you need to trigger the build on the latest version of the sources on a particular event (a change in the repository, a temporal event), to generate reports and to send notifications upon failure (by mail, twitter, etc).
And this is precisely the responsibility of a CI engine: offering trigger mechanisms, being able to get the latest version of the sources, running the build, generating and publishing reports, sending notifications. CI engines do implement this.
And because running a build is CPU and Disk intensive, CI engines usually run on a dedicated machine (or even a farm of machines if you want to build lots of projects).
Back to your question now. Once you've got Hudson running, configure it (Manage Hudson > Configure System): setup the JDK, build tools, etc. Then setup an Hudson Job and follow the steps: configure the location of the source repository, the build tool, the trigger, a notification channel and you're done (you can do more complex things but that's a start).
For more details on the setup, check:
The official Use Hudson guide for more details. << START HERE
Continuous Integration with Hudson - Tutorial.
Spot defects early with Continuous Integration.
Martin Fowler's overview of continuous integration is one of the canonical references. In my opinion, using automation to make sure your code base is healthy is one of the most useful things that you can set up.
Update Sorry that I didn't have much time earlier to expand on my reply. #Pascal_Thivent is right that in order to effectively use CI, you need to be able to automate your builds, tests, etc. CI is actually a good forcing function for this. For me, it's one of those little warning flags if I start to think that it would be too painful to put a build into Hudson. It means that something is not quite right.
What I like about Hudson is that it's flexible enough to accommodate different workflows. We use it for both builds / unit tests and releases. And it eliminates a lot of the worry about certain release procedures only working in one person's environment.
What I don't like about Hudson is that it is occasionally unstable when new builds break plugins. I've had a couple of upgrades (2 out of 10 or so) go bad because of incompatibilities. I do two things now:
I never upgrade my team's Hudson server to the latest and greatest right away. I generally only upgrade when there are significant new features, or bug fixes.
I now have a basic Hudson instance set up with all my plugins on a virtual machine with some dummy builds that I fire up to test out any new upgrades before doing it on the public server.
Related
The best part of UrbanCode Deploy is it models a component based architecture application, and its deployment environment so well that everybody can understand in 10 minutes. Very initiative, flexible and powerful. Don't know if there is another tool does this well.
Jenkins Pipeline can orchestra the Continuously Delivery workflow at the higher level to include the build, test, etc.
Does it make sense?
There's a new UCD plugin for Jenkins that adds nice integrations with the Jenkins 2.0 pipeline. I'm going to poke the developers since there doesn't seem to be a nice video showing it, but there is documentation (and a link to the plugin) out here:
https://developer.ibm.com/urbancode/docs/jenkins-build-step-integration-with-ibm-urbancode-deploy/
I think the idea is that you can use Jenkins pipeline to govern the flow of a build through early test environments, while UCD owns the late test environments / production when the pipeline operates more at the snapshot level. Would love your feedback!
Today, in my production environment, i use Jenkins to manage my build (like a "build pipeline" with some tests) and put all my build results into Urbancode Code station. Urbancode is doing all my deploy work perfectly, the integration with Jenkins is beautiful, easy and fast. I have read some articles about Jenkins delivery pipeline and do not recommend use it.
Check it out
https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/tools
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.
I decided to use the following pattern after reading semantic versioning at http://semver.org/. However, I have some unsolved issues in my mind in terms of automaticng and integrating SDLC tools.
Version Pattern:
major.minor.revision.build
Such that;
Major: major changes, should be increamented manually.
Minor: minor changes, should be increamented automatically, whenever a new feature or an enhancement to existing feature is solved in issue tracking system.
Revision: changes not affecting the minor changes, should be increamented automatically, whenever a bug is solved in issue tracking system.
Assume that developers never commit the source unless an issue has been solved in issue tracking system, and the issue tracking system is JIRA in this configuration. This means that there are bugs, improvements, and new features as issue types by default, apart from the tasks.
Furthermore, I am adding a continous integration tool in this configuration, and assume that it is bamboo (by the way, I never used bamboo before, I used Hudson), and I am using Eclipse IDE with mylyn plugin and plus the project is a Maven project (web).
Now, I want to elucidate what I want to do by illustrating following scenario. Analyst (A) opens an issue (I), which is a new feature, related to Maven project (P). As a developer (D), I receive an email about the issue, and I open the task via Mylyn interface in Eclipse. I understand and develop the new feature related to issue (I). Consider, I am a Test Driven Development oriented developer, thus I wrote the Unit, DBUnit, and User-Acceptance (for example using Selenium) tests correspondingly. Finally, I commit the changes to the source control. I think the rest should be cycled automatically but I don't know how can I achieve this? The auto-cycled part is the following:
The Source Control System should have a post-hook script that triggers the Continous integration tool to build the project (P). While building, in the proper phase the test code should be run, and their reports generated. The user-acceptance test should be performed in a dedicated server (For example, jboss, or Tomcat). The order of this acceptance test should be, up the server, run the UA test, then generate the UA test reports and down the server. If all these steps have been successfuly completed, the versioning should be performed. In versioning part, the Maven plugin, or what so ever, should take the number of issues solved from the Issue Tracking System, and increment the related version fragments (minor and revision), at last appends the build number. The fragments of the version may be saved in manifest file in order to show it in User Interface. Last but not the least, the CI tool should deploy it in Test environment. That's all auto-cycled processes I want.
The deployment of the artifact to the production environment should be done automatically or manually?
Let's start with the side question: On the automatic deployment to production, this requires the sign off of "the business" whomever that is. How good do your tests need to be to automatically push to production? Are they good enough that you trust things to just go live? What's your downtime? Is that acceptable? If your tests miss something, can you rollback? Are you monitoring production so you know if you've introduced problems? Generally, the answers to enough of these questions is negative enough that you can't auto-deploy there as the result of a build / autotest event.
As for the tracking, you'll need a few things. You'll need all your assumptions to be true (which I doubt they are, but if you get there that's awesome). You'll also need a build number that can be incremented after build time based on test results. You'll need source changes to be annotated with bug ids. You'll need the build system to parse the source changes and make associations with issues. You'll need an API into the build system so you can get the count of issues associated with the build. Finally you'll need your own bit of scripting to do the query and update the build number accordingly.
That's totally doable, but is it really worth having? What's the value you attach to the numbering scheme?
We have a large collection of nAnt scripts that build our various products. They almost all have the following structure:
Erase old working copy.
Check out complete fresh copy from version control.
Increment build number in appropriate file (custom nAnt task).
Run static analysis (StyleCop, Perl scripts)
Build solution using Visual Studio - ends up with MSI output.
Run unit tests (nUnit, JSUnit)
Run static analysis (FxCop)
Zip up deliverables (MSI, readme, etc) into well-named package.
Put this zip package onto a server share.
Email results to team.
From our research, it seems that CruiseControl(.net?)/Hudson/BuildBot would only add the trigger that causes the build, which at the moment is double-clicking the nAnt script over Remote Desktop and a status dashboard.
Are we missing anything else significant?
The question is subjective, and thus so is my answer.
In the projects I've automated before, CruiseControl was used essentially for that one purpose: so we didn't have to remote into the build machine and trigger builds. The CI part is that CruiseControl will monitor the repository for you, triggering builds at the intervals you define.
It also gave us the dashboard from which could trigger releases, or go back to examine logs and artefacts from past builds.
For us that was enough benefit to implement CruiseControl. Perhaps it doesn't "seem" like much until you've finished it and a month later realized you haven't had to touch your build system because it's off silently and thanklessly doing its thing for you.
A Continuous Integration server such as Hudson would do 1, 2, 3, 9 and 10 for you so that you don't have to implement them yourself. If you've already got it working that's maybe not a huge improvement for your current project but it makes things simpler for subsequent projects. It would also, as you mention, take care of when to trigger the build.
Hudson will also chart various trends over time, such as test coverage, build time, static analysis results. You can also have more sophisticated notifications than just e-mail if you choose.
The most important thing it gives you is visual feedback (the bigger the screen is better). When you have one machine, dedicated to displaying buildresults, visible to all team members, it works like a catalyst to people see that something is wrong and fixes it.
If you have something like that standing in a place where your boss can see it and ask you "Hey Wilkinson, why is this screen red?" will you fix your build faster?
Thay all look the same, you can pick whatever you think fits your needs, just have one setup and running.
Our software is built on linux and windows platforms. Depending on the preference of the developer a contribution is developed and tested on either platform and then committed to our subversion repository. It then turns out that the contribution doesn't build on the other platform, and a fix has to be made. The fix on the other platform may again break the build on the original platform, and so on.
I'd rather see that a contribution is built (and regression tested) on the other platform as well before being committed. We have a continuous build server (CruiseControl), but that server builds from the repository. I am looking for a solution where the continuous build server builds on the other platform as a pre-commit check and then commits the stuff if the build and test succeed.
Any suggestions?
Teamcity handles pre-tested commit, you may be able to do something with the new build chaining features in 4.0( http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/features/newfeatures.html ). Agents are cross platform and can be configured to only run particular bits of the build, so could possibly be configured to only run a subset of tests.
Note that I haven't actually done this :)
It might be easier to have two branches, one where people checkin, and another which they merge their changes into after they have passed continuous integration.
Matheiu Godlewski has made a good suggestion at the CruiseControl wiki
If you combine his suggestion with the veto element, I think you should be set.
We used a custom build and test rig that could remotely deploy to multiple OSes (and multiple Database products on multiple OSes). This was done as a nightly build with a rule that you fix your bugs the next morning.
No entirely continuous then, but that's potentially a lot of work to do on a pre-commit hook. Especially if your source control repository locks the affected files for the duration of the pre-commit hook execution.
I think there's a difference between a continuous integration test that runs during the day, per-commit, and a system integration test that runs nightly.
Douglas Leeder suggested an "integration" branch - the nice thing about it is that it's possible to automate. If the tests pass - merge to the 'trunk'.
Some version control systems (e.g. bzr/hg/git) make this easier than others, but it's possible on most.