First Experiences with CruiseControl

An article by Glen    No Comments

After reading Mike Clark’s amazing book on Automation, I’ve been pumped to take a look at Continuous integration with CruiseControl. We’ve been using Anthill for our build process, so that’ll give me a benchmark to compare.

First of all, my experience with Anthill has been pretty sensational. Its got a very smick UI and seems to work pretty well as spec’d on the tin. The install is a matter of dragging the war file into your webserver, and (mostly) using the web ui to configure the rest. Little bit of commandline CVS stuff for your project by hand, but largely pretty much “just works” – so bit kudos to those guys.

CruiseControl is a little more work for your result. There are xml config files to build and edit, there are cvs commandline things to do to get your directories setup (if you don’t want to hardcode passwords, etc). But you a rewarded with abuntant power for your investment. The doco is solid, and if you follow the worked example you’ll stay mostly out of trouble.

To capture some of the dramas I had: (all of which were resolved with the latest FAQ)

• Couldn’t find my junit task in ant…. turns out I needed to modify my launching config.xml to use the AntScript attribute so that ANT_HOME was actually being located properly.
• Couldn’t get CVS to recognise any changes in a tagged branch in my respository… which turns out needing to specify the “tag” attribute to match my branch name in the cvs call in config.xml.
• Integrating nicely as a service under unix. I managed to find a nice Unix shell script via the FAQ that let’s you do all those nifty start/stop operations (and sets up the ports for the JMX console, which, if you don’t specify a -port on startup, ends killing off the Console page in your webapp).

Overall I’d say that, on first impressions, CC seems a lot more powerful than Anthill. The GUI definitely isn’t as nice, but the power is pretty unbelievable.

As a straight nightly build system, I’d probably go with Anthill (since it’s a snap to install and very easy to learn for developes). But for raw power, there’s something very flexible about cruisecontrol. One feature that I love is the ability to see who has done commits since the last automated build. Great for identifying “you broke the build” candidates, who, at the current site I’m at, need to put a $1 in a jar.

More impressions once we’ve given cruise a bit more of a workout, but definitely worth a look if you’ve been thinking about setting up a continuous build process.