How do i use RVM w/ Hudson CI server on Debian?

Question

I'm trying to setup an automated "build" server for my rails projects using Hudson CI. SO far it's able to run specs and do metrics on the code but I have 2 different projects dependent on 2 different versions of ruby. So i'm trying to use RVM to run multiple copies of ruby then switch back and forth in a pre-build step.

I found a couple posts like this one that try and explain how to make this work, but I'm not running a startup script for hudson, it starts on boot which is how it worked out of the box when i installed it via the debian instructions.

The problem seems to be that even though hudson runs under the "hudson" account and that account has rvm installed (and working) when it tries to run a shell based prebuild step to call rvm switch 1.8.7 it fails with the error "rvm: command not found"

Not sure what I'm doing wrong. Hudson is using SH as its shell but i also tried using bash. no luck.

Has anyone gotten this working before in this setup?

Answer 1

edit the "/etc/init.d/hudson" (!) and change the line:

SU=/bin/su

... change to:

SU="/bin/su -"

... and add rvm setup in the /home/hudson/.profile

Answer 2

I had the same symptoms as you.

After a couple of hours of headbanging, check your $HOME environment variable for Hudson (viewable at http://yourserver/hudson/systemInfo).

Under Ubuntu, the Tomcat 6 start script doesn't set $HOME. Somehow, Hudson inherited my $HOME instead!

I added HOME=$CATALINA_HOME to the /etc/init.d/tomcat6 script just under the rest of the ENV declarations, and now it all works. Very annoying issue, to be sure.