I'm trying to figure out how to model my build process in hudson. At present most of our hudson builds are somewhat hard coded in that the build process is series of steps and we have one process per branch.
I have another build system that has many active branches and each build has a series of integration tests which require a suit of machines to execute. As I migrate from the home grown to hudson I'm not quite sure what's the right way to model this to keep sustainability costs and build times to a minimum
Here's my basic build:
- create workspace
- compile, link, package
- transfer artifacts to test systems
- invoke test harness on multiple systems to handle installation and acceptance tests
- collect results
- publish results
I'd like the integration part to be a group of generic machines (perhaps an elastic group) which can handle integration-tests for any branch. I want to run as much in parallel as possible to keep my build times low. It looks like the best way to execute in parallel on hudson is to break up steps into jobs and use the Parameterized Trigger Plugin to customize the generic jobs.
So, i'd have two main jobs: build, test
I could have on build job per branch and a generic test job. The build job would use Parameterized Trigger Plugin to call the test job and provide the location of the build artifacts. The test job would call a series of jobs in parallel passing down parameters for branch, artifact. test test-client-install (params: artifact location, branch) test-server-install (params: artifact location, branch) test-run (params: client machine, server machine) join - collect results (params: client machine, server machine)
Each of the test-* jobs would pull a slave out of the group of slaves and execute. I'm not quite sure how to inform the slaves running the client and server jobs how to find each other nor am I sure how to reserve them from the pool and release them back into it.
I guess, I could have a write properties to a common share and have the sub jobs use that for inter-job communication.
Has anyone created this kind of complex setup in hudson, or is this usually done in another system with which hudson interacts (hudson + STAF with STAF managing resources)?