Continuous Integration Server: Hudson or Sismo?

Question

We're considering using a CI server soon.

From my reading, I've found that Sismo and Hudson were available for PHP project.

Considering that we're actually using GIT and PHPUnit, what are the big difference between Hudson and Sismo that we should know in order to make the best choice for our situation?

Thanks

Answer 1

The language match is not key in your hunt for the best CI server; it's all the features around:

• source control
• concurrent build
• trigger build
• notification

Even for simple project, Jenkins (the new name for Hudson) is easy to use and quick to install. Then it is really easy to scale Jenkins up by adding more nodes (satellite machine that can execute build) when you need to. Also Jenkins has hundreds of plugin for numerous task.

Have a look at Bamboo, Jenkins, TeamCity, and CruiseControl Features to compare some of the features of the big names (you might actually want to consider Bamboo, TeamCity or Cruise Control over Jenkins)

Answer 2

I would lean towards Sismo since it matches the language of the project you are developing (PHP) and can be ran from just a single PHP and config file. Then you don't have to deal with having a java environment just for Hudson .

Answer 3

There is a really good php-integration for Jenkins by the phpunit inventor Sebastian Bergmann. You should really have a look at it.

As far as I see the biggest downside of Sismo is, that is not a "real" CI server, but more a build-and-report-environment, because you need to trigger the builds yourself (or let something trigger it).

Answer 4

I'll preface this by saying that I haven't used sismo.

We use Hudson with applications being built & tested in both Java and PHP. It has a nice plugin system, and getting it up and running on a centOS box took about 15 minutes yesterday. (We had to move it from one box to another).

For PHP Hudson integrates with both PHPUnit and Selenium so we run both unit tests and functional tests against the same codebase. Hudson has a great 'one-click' plugin system that really lets you customize your installation.

One thing we had to get a plugin for was sending an email on every build whether successful or not. Hudson by default will only email when your build goes from good (tests pass) to bad, from bad to good, or repeatedly bad. This means it will not send an email for every build if 2 builds in a row were successful. The email plugin solves this but it was confusing to uncover that.