09.Hudson

To really talk about what I learned about Continuous integration before this assignment, I really need to go over what I knew about it before. I knew that Hudson was a continuous integration application but I originally thought it was just a server program that would keep a copy of your project and build it for you. I had have the idea right. I didn't know what it actually grabbed a copy of your project from a SVN repository and then built it for you. I also didn't know that it used ant and a bunch of other QA test software that we were already implementing to basically build and run tests on our project for us. I also didn't know what Hudson will also send out an RSS feed or some other notification to let us know of some error. I thought we would have to check in on Hudson ourselves.

I really didn't encounter any problems getting Hudson to work with our project since we use a SVN repository, Java, and all the other QA tools for java like ant, PMD, CheckStyle, and such. For the most part it was just setting up the project that took a while. The things that gave me problems were finding my SVN http link, the password for the SVN account and things like that. It really wasn't much of a problem at all.

The steps needed to actually set up Hudson with our project are pretty standard. First off we needed to install Hudson. This is easy enough because we just needed to "java -jar hudson.war" or deploy the Hudson war file into any running server application like tomcat. Then we need to set up the ant installation which just meant going into Hudson homepage and clicking on the "manage hudson" and "system configuration" links then add the local directory for ant.

Then we need to set up the SVN repository with just amounted to clicking this link, "http://localhost:8080/scm/SubversionSCM/enterCredential" and typing in the link for your SVN repository and the respective account username/password combination that you've set up just for Hudson.

Then we need to set up the project. We needed to click on the new job link on the homepage and select "Build a free-style software option." On the next page, we need to setup Hudson to use SVN, how often we are going to poll the SVN, and what to run (ant) when we build the project.

Now Hudson should already start to download and build the project. The only other thing to do is to set up all the other QA tools and we should be done. This is just as simple as downloading the plug in's from the Husdon webpage and installing them under the "Manage Hudson" link that can found under the main page. After installing the plug in's and restarting Hudson, there should be a "manage plugin" link under "Manage Hudson" link. From here you can manage all the different tools such as PMD, FindBugs and such.