Hudson saves Artifacts to Amazon S3

I recently start to work a lot with Amazon AWS by utilizing EC2 servers and using S3 as online storage. While you should do your maths using the servers to generously (it quickly becomes expensive if you create instances on the fly and keep them running), S3 usage is a rather innocent matter. Currently 1GB costs you 0.15 U$ per month (more details here), but please dont forget to look at data transfer charges as well (not longer free from November 2010). I use the service mainly for backup purpose, while I still rely on local backups once a month, the continuous backup happens on S3 (which might be safer than my backup harddisk). The data volume I transfer is small enough (not maintaining a filesharing server !) to keep the costs low.

I was looking for a way to transfer my Hudson artifacts to my S3 account and could not find a regular promoted plugin, almost creating a manual script as workaround, until I found a plugin, which you still need by yourself, but works perfectly. This tutorial (based on Ubuntu) is a hands-on walk-through from the scratch. Some steps are rather simple.

In this previous tutorial I described my approach of using artifacts as a backup media.

Update 2010-10-04: There is another updater in github who added functionality to the plugin: here the address git://github.com/d6y/hudson-s3.git

Pre-requisites:

• A running Hudson instance. You can download it from here and run it from on local machine (java -jar hudson.war) for testing purpose.
• An Amazon AWS account (create it here)
• A sample project on a svn server (like in the previous tutorial)
• The Apache Build Manager Maven. Don’t have it ? sudo apt-get install maven2 (up to 270MB depending what packages you have pre-installed)
• A GIT sourcecode version control client. Don’t have it ? sudo apt-get install git git-core

Tutorial Step 1 (Preparation of S3)

• You need to activate the S3 service in your AWS account if you haven’t done yet.
• Create a bucket (kind of a container for files in S3). Note this buckets are NOT public. No one can touch our files.
  

  Create a bucket

• Take not of your access key and secret access key (Account|Security Credential|Access Keys)
  

  Retrieve keys

Tutorial Step 2 (Build the plugin)

• This is straight forward and simple, following the instructions from http://github.com/dougm/hudson-s3
• Create a folder and get the sourcecode (git clone git://github.com/d6y/hudson-s3.git , original source clone http://github.com/dougm/hudson-s3.git)
• Open the folder and move the file and execute mvn
  

  Build the plugin

• You should have a s3.hpi file now. Copy it to your ~/.hudson/plugins folder
  

  s3.hpi

Tutorial Step 3 (Configure Hudson and project)

• Start Hudson (java -jar hudson.war) and goto Manage Hudson|Configure System
  Enter your S3 access credentials
  

  Configure plugin

• Configure your project
  

  Configure Project

  For the filenames and location the same logic applies as for saving artifacts.

• Build the project
  

  Building Console Output

  

  Amazon bucket

Thanks to Doug MacEachern for the plugin !

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