CruiseControl (CC) is the third wheel in the pragmatic programming approach. The first two being source version control (e.g. SVN) and testing (e.g. JUnit). It is geared towards Java-based projects, but is so popular it is now available for .NET and Ruby. One of the joys of Java means that installation is a breeze as you can grab the binaries and go.
Installation on Mac OS X & Linux
A servlet server is required to run CC, thankfully one is included in the form of Jetty. You can use an existing servlet server, e.g. Tomcat. I did try to use Tomcat and while I did get the web interfaces to run I did lose some functionality, plus the dashboard isn't as mature as the JSP tool, yet.
Essentially unzip cruisecontrol-bin-2.7.3.zip into /cruisecontrol. Run cruisecontrol.sh and CC is running! Very simple, see the live webpages at http://localhost:8080 and http://localhost:8080/dashboard. Make sure ports 8080 and 8000 are allowed on your firewall. (8000 for JMX, see later). If you don't get anything look in the log file, cruisecontrol.log. You can alter the ports in cruisecontrol.sh.
Now CC is up and running lets go through the components.
- The build loop, this is the java process which monitors your selected CVS/SVN repositories, if it detects a change (e.g. you commit something) it will checkout the project to a local directory and attempt to compile/test/package it as per your instructions in your build.xml. If you don't have ant scripts for your projects now is the time to write them. The build loop will then report the results, either a pass or fail with details for failed unit tests/compilation errors.
- The reporting loop, originally this just consisted of JSP pages, now dashboard has come along in web 2.0 glory. Dashboard does everything the JSP pages do and more, plus is far easier on the eye. With both tools you can force a build of your project (this uses JMX and this requires an open port, 8000, to communicate on), if you don't want to wait for the next scheduled build. All the XML reports from the build loop are displayed in the two interfaces.
To configure your CC instance edit config.xml, it comes with a sample project in. Use it to construct your project settings and read this to see what else is available (e.g. email users upon a failed build, attach artifacts to successful build, e.g. a jar).
Finally you will want to add Subversion functionality to CC by seeing my previous post. The built-in support doesn't seem to actually work.
