The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5) - cruisecontrol.net

cruisecontrol.net - anyone using it?

automated builds are a good thing.
cruisecontrol.net <http://www.continuousintegration.net/> seems to be a good tool to automatically generate them every time the underling code repository changes (someone checks something in).

Is anyone using it? I have it working, and am going to upgrade to this week's release so it can run as a service, but still have lots of questions. Is there a community out there? There appears to be a mailing list with no archives, and that's it.

mb
Thursday, January 15, 2004

The URL is:

http://www.continuousintegration.net/

(you may also have seen http://ccnet.thoughtworks.com )

mb
Thursday, January 15, 2004

I evaluated both cruisecontrol and draco -- http://draconet.sourceforge.net/ -- last year for a project.

I ended up going with draco. Our projects build environment is fairly complex and I couldn't get cruisecontrol working (albeit in the small timeframe I allowed). I think the problem was that they included their own version of nant which didn't work with the build scripts I had.

Having continuous builds on checkin is great. But I'd like to see one of these tools with an integrated web front end. I hacked together a few pages to show the build history and unit test output, but more control would be nice.

It would be good to have a build on-demand (including historical versions) and source control labelling features available.

Rob Walker
Thursday, January 15, 2004

I'm surprised no one else is using it. It's been discussed here before.

Newer versions of CruiseControl seem to do some of the things you need:
* Runs with nant 0.8.3. I think it works with any recent nant version now.
* Has a web page with historical and current results.
* Has a web service and a taskbar app and some sort of web page I haven't yet figured out for remote control.
You can kick off a build, but only a current build. Kicking off a historical build, or with different parameters, is a neat idea but beyond what the program does today (monitor the tip & always run the same command against it.)

There are still lots of things I don't understand, like how to use the service app included in the current build--there is no documentation at all, and I don't feel like reading the source code.

mb
Friday, January 16, 2004