Happy Builds With Hudson

Great T-shirt on an audience member. </div>

I gave a two hour presentation on Hudson this week at our local Sacramento JUG on “Happy Builds with Hudson”. About 20-25 people showed and I got plenty of good questions from the audience. I did ask one audience question. By a show of hands how many people already have a continuous build. About 50% of the room raised their hands. The adoption rate is pretty good, but continuous integration is probably the easiest XP/Agile practice to adopt and half the room still hasn’t tried it out yet.

I covered Hudson fairly deeply including:

• Dashboard weather icons. Now you can see the recent status of your project at a glance, not just the last build.
• Static analysis plugins. They’ve added plugins to merge findbugs, checkstyle, PMD, and todo tasks into graphics with trend lines.
• Master-slave builds. Still haven’t tried this out or really needed to, but nice to know it’s there.
• Matrix builds. You can setup a single project, but define different JDKs, different OSes, etc and Hudson will automatically create builds for all of the possible options.

If you haven’t taken a look at Hudson and you’re not 100% happy with your current build tool there are just three steps:

1. Download hudson.war
2. Run:

   1	java -jar hudson.war

3. Open a web browser to http://localhost:8080