Monday, February 16, 2009

Hudson, run a bypass

I thought I would share a pleasant experience I had with a CI (continuous integration) tool called Hudson. I have used other tools like this in the past including Anthill, CruiseControl, and TeamCity. While these tools did their job none of them seemed as easy to use as Hudson.

Hudson downloads as a self contained war file that launches from a command line:

java -jar hudson.war

That is really it to get running and there is nothing else to install. Hudson comes with a built in servlet engine called Winstone. There are no configuration files that you have to touch because you use the built-in intuitive UI to configure the Hudson server and your projects. There are tons of plugins available that can be used to extend the core functionality or you can write your own custom plugins. We run Starteam (yuck) for source control internally but I found a plugin for it and installed it from the web administration. Very simple! I was able to configure SCM checkout, setup email notifications, and execute our build script successfully in about 15 minutes without knowing the product. If you want to see what awesome open source projects look like check out Hudson.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I FEEL SAFER ALREADY.

Unknown said...

Game over man, GAME OVER!