Subversion with CruiseControl

As we use subversion for our version control we need to do an extra step as CruiseControl only has limited subversion support (e.g. it can't checkout a project, I'm sure it should but has never worked for me).

To give it the power to do so you need to download SvnAnt. Copy the three jar's from the lib folder into the the lib folder in your installation: /cruisecontrol/apache-ant-1.7.0/lib. This way everything that keeps CruiseControl happy is in one place.Now you need to define a property file defining the location of SvnAnt, something like the file svn-build.props:

svnant.version=1.0.0

lib.dir=../apache-ant-1.7.0/lib

svnant.jar=${lib.dir}/svnant.jar
svnClientAdapter.jar=${lib.dir}/svnClientAdapter.jar
svnjavahl.jar=${lib.dir}/svnjavahl.jar

You need to ensure the lib.dir value is valid, depending where you call this file from (in this example /cruisecontrol/project). As you will see we make a wrapper script to grab the code from the repo, before launching the project ant script. The wrapper script may be in /cruisecontrol/project, but defines it basedir as /cruisecontrol/checkout.

A sample script can be found here (Blogger doesn't want to display it). To use it save to /cruisecontrol/project and edit the sample_project and subversion path. Your project will be checked out to /cruisecontrol/checkout, where it is built, tested, compiled etc. For the first time I had to checkout manually otherwise CruiseControl would kick a fuss up.

In your main config.xml call the new wrapper script (/cruisecontrol/project/sample_project.xml) in the schedule section. This way a fresh copy of the code is checked out before the CruiseControl commences the build.