Hudson is a slick, stable, and easy to install continuous integration environment. You’ll be using it in minutes. Honest.

Install Java

Hudson is a java webapp. Ubuntu comes with Sun’s JVM installed by default, so this is a no-op.

Download and Install Hudson

mkdir -p ~/.hudson
cd ~/.hudson
wget http://hudson-ci.org/latest/hudson.war
java -jar ~/.hudson/hudson.war --httpPort=9000 &

You should see something like this:

Running from: /Users/mrm/.hudson/hudson.war
[Winstone] - Beginning extraction from war file
...
INFO: Completed initialization

If you don’t, you should check the documentation on the hudson wiki.

Create your first Hudson Job

Go to http://localhost:9000, and create a new “job” — jobs hold the build instructions for a project. They can be built from N build commands and N source code repositories, and have N final artifacts.

There are two main configuration items to concentrate on:

1. where hudson should get your code, and
2. how it should do a build.

The where is configured in the “Source Code Management” section. The how is configured in the “Build” section. You’ll want to click “Add build step” and choose the appropriate option.

Most likely you want it to rebuild your project whenever someone commits changes. If you aren’t familiar with cron, it might be a bit confusing. “*/5 * * * *” means poll every 5 minutes (whenever the minute value is evenly divisible by 5), like so:

Kudos to the developers!

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