Jenkins CI

I migrated (lie the majority if Hudson users) to Jenkins. The migration is easy and simple (backup, add jenkins deb in sources.list, install, the rest if fixed by Jenkins). All info for migrating users here. While Jenkins regained its frequent release cycle, former Hudson is still sitting on version 1.398.

Jenkins CI Book

I want to highlight the first (and only) book about Jenkins CI by John Smart (link): You can download it for free. Thanks !

Hudson Plugin’s of the day

I really enjoy using Hudson as CI platform every day. It is open, it is vastly extensible, has a great community support and not to forget the outstanding job by Kohsuke to create Hudson and lay out the foundation of this ecosystem. There is always more to learn, find new ways to do jobs with Hudson, maybe that is the reason why there is no book yet about Hudson. I just want to highlight 3 very simple plugins that make life easer:

• Build Timeout (link)
  I have some jobs that take a long time, mainly because they transfer artifacts to S3 and deploy applications to test and demo servers. Once in a while I run into timeouts or hanging batch scripts which will make the complete job haning. If you dont notice you start creating a build queue. This plugin terminates a job if it extends the configurable time limit.
  

  Build Timeout

• Time Stamper (link)
  With lon running jobs if would be helpful when which task started and how long it took to finish. The plugin does nothing but putting a timestamp in front of each line of the console output.
  

  Time Stamper

• FTP Publisher (link)
  For simple file transfers you might want to try this plugin instead of batch script coding the transfer.

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

Quick Tutorial: Hudson and Artifacts

I really like using Hudson ! It is amazing what magic you can do with it, even some stuff is simple, like the “Archive the artifacts” feature. Dont you have the same situation: Some build running on some server will create an error that you can’t see in you current codebase. Would be nice to get exact the sourcecode and deployment that belongs to this build ? I keep the workspace (sourcecode excluding the build folder and .svn folder) with the 2 steps below.