Fair Warning: This is more notes for me to remember and document how to do these things rather than particularly detailed instructions. Therefore, it might be missing sections and will assume a reasonable knowledge of hudson/jenkins and not to mention the benefits of continuous integration and builds.

Installing hudson / jenkins is easy enough. I deployed as part of a pre-existing tomcat6 installation so was as simple as popping the war file into the webapps folder. Tomcat automatically started it up without issues.

I chose to have hudson use /home/hudson as its home directory. Since I am running an ubuntu system, I added a line into /etc/defaults/tomcat6. There are various other ways of doing this but it was a quick fix for me.

You of course need to make sure the directory exists. I also popped in a .m2 folder from my home directory to save it from downloading all the various jar files and included a settings.xml file with appropriate configurations.

Hudson 2.2 uses maven 3 but I use maven 3 locally as well even though the projects pom files were built for maven 2. There doesn’t seem to be any issues with this setup.

First step is to create a new job from the home page. This asks for which type a job you want to create. If you use maven and a standard source control, it is as simple as choosing the first option: Build a free-style software project.

Give it a name and you are brought to the configuration screen. There are a number of options here and I started with the basic set:

I chose Subversion for the source control management section and gave it the svn path. There is a checkout strategy as well and I chose the one to revert and update which I feel to be a bit cleaner.

I chose to poll the scm every fifteen minutes

*/15 * * * *

and saved.

Running the build pulled the code out of svn and stopped there. This was because I didn’t add a step to build / install it.

Go back into configure the job and add a maven 3 build step. This automatically selected the clean install goals. Save and build now and the project was checked out and built without issues.

Success!

There are a number of other options you can play with here but this gives you a solid starting point.

Later on, I will cover the addition of various other plugins for source analysis including findbugs and pmd.