hudson for newbies: how do i run software after successful build

Question

i'm new to world of continuous integration and software developement.

I wanted to try hudson so i installed it on my ubuntu machine and created a new job. i pointed it to an open source project's svn (keepassx) just to try.

Hudson downloaded everything from the repository and marked blue for successful build. aren't i suppose to be able to execute the software now somehow ? i thought once it is built i can run it, but i can't find any executable in the project's home page under hudson user home dir.

thanks.

Answer 1

A Hudson/Jenkins build breaks down into three steps:

• update source code in workspace
• run build
• publish build artifacts

It sounds like you've got step 1 covered.

If the project you linked to has instructions for building (ant, maven, etc.), you can enter these as build steps into the "Build" section of the project configuration.

You can then take the resulting files ("artifacts"--jar, exe, so, bin, whatever) and publish these using the "Post-build Actions", or if necessary you can grab them directly from the workspace filesystem.

Assuming the build artifact was an executable, you could then run it after downloading it from Hudson, or make a build step or post-build action which moved it into the appropriate location and ran it.

It helps to run the build locally before trying to get Hudson to handle it--then you know what the build steps are, and what the final build artifacts are.

Answer 2

How would jenkins/hudson know how to 'execute' some arbitrary package that you told it to download and build? It's up to you to write a program or script to run what you want to run, and then make a downstream job (for example) to do so.