Monday, March 17, 2008

Hudson - My first impression of continuous integration

Things I learned about continuous integration that I did not know before
The Hudson is running on the CSDL telemetry wall since the semester began, and I kind of grab the idea of what it is doing by looking it so often since my project requires me to look on that wall every now and then. What I didn’t notice, however, is that it not only does compile and build the project, but also runs various QA tools, such as checkstyles, PMD, findbugs, JUnit, etc. Also I didn’t know that Hudson is so automated that once you set it up, you can almost forget about it. The features that Hudson offers are far more than I expected.

Problems I had to resolve in order to get the informative workspace system to build under Hudson
I have encountered various problems while I was trying to getting my informative workspace system to work under Hudson, but the real problem that took me quite a while to figure out was to make the system deploy in tomcat by Hudson. First of all, since the system is deployed in tomcat, it requires the tomcat to be running first. And since tomcat is using the default 8080 port, I have to somehow change the port for Hudson. (Well, actually now I think about it, maybe deploying Hudson in tomcat would also solve the problem.) Anyways, what I did was putting the "--httpPort=8081" parameter. However, changing the port didn't solve my problem. I still got the error of deploying the war file into tomcat, and it is a http response 505 error. After some googling, I guessed the problem was caused by the "C:\Documents and Settings" folder, which was the default home directory for Hudson to store a local copy of the SVN files. Since the way I deploy my war file is using ant script, and ant doesn't like the spaces, it simply refused to work. After I set up a variable HUDSON_HOME and points it to a folder without space, things went very smooth. (I still haven't set the emma up, but I was thinking to exclude it from my normal build routine anyways, so I will just leave it as it is for now.)

Update: Later I tried to create a new job with space in the name and the deployment also failed. This could be the original reason for the failure in the deployment. But since ant doesn't like space anyways, I would rather to keep things simple by eliminating both the spaces in HUDSON_HOME and in the job name.

Steps Philip has to carry out in order to get the informative workspace system running using the CSDL Hudson server
Other than setting HUDSON_HOME to a folder without space (which I assume is already been done), I don't see there are any extra steps needed for getting the informative workspace system running in the CSDL Hudson server.

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