We're using Hudson continuous integration server frequently on projects. But Hudson seems lacking of proper versioning of the jobs configuration.
A few times, this has lead to problems: Somebody changes or tweaks the configuration on jobs and something that used to work stopped working.
I have tried to version-control jobs on my local Hudson server (on my laptop). But this is not optimal: 1) it's only for me. 2) i need to mirror jobs from a central build server – and may also need to modify them to work locally. 3) It's pretty cumbersome to setup .gitignores for files to ignore.
As far as I know, there is no way in Hudson to view change history of jobs, and no plugin does it either.
Also, there seems to be no way to export/import settings.
So the question is: How do you keep track of changes? Both in jobs and in general setup of Hudson?
See Which part of HUDSON_HOME should I put under source control?
The Audit Trail plugin might be useful to you too if people are breaking configurations and you're having trouble tracking it down.
Here is another option that I just found:
JobConfigHistory
Related
I work for a fairly new web development company and we are currently testing subversion installations to implement a versioning system. One of the features we need the versioning system to perform is to update the development server with an edited file once it has been committed.
We would like to maintain one server for all of our SVN repositories, even though, due to system requirements, we need to maintain several separate development servers. I understand that the updates are fairly simple when the development server resides in the same location as SVN, but that is just not possible for us. So, we need to map separate network drives to the SVN server for each development server.
However, this errors on commit. Here is my working copy test directory, as referenced in the post-commit.bat file:
SET WORKING_COPY=Z:\testweb
This, however, results in an error...
post-commit hook failed (exit code 1) with output: svn: Error resolving case of 'Z:\testweb'
I'm sure this is because the server is not the same user as me and therefore does not have the share I need mapped to "Z" - I just have no idea how to work around this. Can anyone help?
UPDATE: The more I look in to these issues it appears that the real solution to the problem is to use a CI Server to accomplish what I am attempting to accomplish. I am currently looking in to TeamCity and what it might do for us.
Don't do this through a post-commit hook. If you ever manage to get the hook to succeed, you'll be causing the person who did the commit to wait until the update is complete. Instead, I recommend that you use Jenkins which is a continuous build engine.
It is possible that you don't have anything to build. After all, if you're using PHP or JavaScript, there's nothing to compile. However, you can still use Jenkins to do the update for you.
I can't get into the nitty-gritty detail hear, but one of the things you can do with Jenkins is redefine its working directory. You can do this by clicking on the Advanced button when you define a job, and it'll ask you where you want the working directory. In this case, you can specify your server's working directory.
One of the things you can do with Jenkins is have it automatically run tests, or maybe do a bit smoother update. For example, you might have to restart your web server when you change a few files, or maybe you need to make sure that if you're changing 100 files, they all get changed at once, or your server isn't in a stable state. You could use Jenkins to do this too. And, if there are any problems, you can have Jenkins email the person who is responsible for the server that the server update failed.
Jenkins is easy to setup and use. You can download it and start up Jenkins in 10 minutes. Setting up a job in Jenkins might take you another 15 minutes if you had never seen Jenkins before and had no idea how it works.
It is around 10 months now that Jenkins split off from Hudson.
When looking at the project homepages I am wondering what the differences between Hudson and Jenkins in the meantime really are. From the changelog I do not realy learn much. There are a bunch of changes and the major difference seems to be that Jenkins releases more often with less changes and Hudson less frequently, but then with more changes in a release.
Are there any notable differences yet?
So are there things that make me as a developer needing a CI system more productive rather with the one or the other?
Is one of them more stable than the other?
Is there any difference yet that has nothing to do with politics around Oracle?
What is the most notable difference from your point of view?
One notable difference is that a big number of plugins moved to Jenkins. While you would still be able to use the old versions with Hudson, the newer versions depend on Jenkins already. Also new plugins are mostly created with dependencies on quite recent Jenkins versions, so you probably won't be able to use them without hassle on Hudson.
This will probably differ from plugin to plugin, some might be more compatible with Hudson than others, while still others provide versions for both tools. But if something does not work well with a plugin you will receive help easier if you use Jenkins.
EDIT: Here is an interesting link I found, not only providing some solid numbers on the different paths Jenkins and Hudson have taken, but also addressing the (non-)issue of IP that was mentioned in the other post here...
check out the work being done on cleaning up the code and the IP checks that are needed to belong to Eclipse Foundation. This is one of the big differentiators if you care about clean IP.
How many plugins are you using? Hudson supports many of the most important plugins independently and is working with plugin owners to keep compatibility with those that are still maintained by their owners at Jenkins.
See the JavaOne presentations that show how Hudson is being maintained and new features added.
https://oracleus.wingateweb.com/scheduler/eventcatalog/eventCatalogJavaOne.do (search for Hudson)
Also check out the Hudson project at Eclipse http://www.eclipse.org/hudson/
I'm thinking of using Hudson as my continuous integration server. In the past i have used the Pulse build server from Zutubi which had a nice feature called personal builds that allows a user to test a changelist on the Pulse server before committing the code. Does anyone know if Hudson offers this as either a built in feature or via a plugin?
From the answers on other questions on stackoverflow, there might be a way to emulate this feature with git and Hudson. Don't know if that might be an option for you.
I have used Pulse for a while and that's one of the things I'm missing. I don't think hudson does that.
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.
We have a continuous integration server with over 40 jobs that are constantly changing. I would like to version control continuous integration build jobs in Hudson so we can roll back changes if we have problems.
Is there a Hudson plugin that will do this or other solution that already exists or should I keep the config.xml files in SVN.
Hudson Labs has a really great write up on this, Keeping your configuration and data in Subversion
This is the first bit of the article
We all know that keeping important
files in version control is critical,
as it ensures problematic changes can
be reverted and can serve as a backup
mechanism as well. Code and resources
are often kept in version control, but
it can be easy to forget your
continuous integration (CI) server
itself! If a disk were to die or fall
victim to a misplaced rm -rf, you
could lose all the history and
configuration associated with the jobs
your CI server manages.
It’s pretty simple to create a
repository, but it isn’t obvious which
parts of your $HUDSON_HOME you’ll want
to backup. You’ll also want to have
some automation so new projects get
added to the repository, and deleted
ones get removed. Luckily we have a
great tool to handle this: Hudson!
We have a Hudson job which runs
nightly, performs the appropriate SVN
commands, and checks in
You only seem to be interested in the configuration, which is fine, just ignore or filter out the bits about the data and focus on the configuration.
This is one of the more recent threads about using version control with Hudson's configuration on the Hudson users list.
There are no plugins to do store configuration in an SCM right now (March 2010) though the backup plugin might do something close to what you want, but perhaps with less of a view of 'change' and more of just a snapshot at any given time.
The relatively new Job Config History plugin gets part of the way there - it doesn't actually store the configurations in source control, but it does provide history and auditing of changes to jobs.
You could look into the SCM Sync configuration plugin.
It automatically commits all of your jenkins config changes to svn. that way you can track configuration errors easily.
https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/SCM+Sync+configuration+plugin