Configuring project report generation for Hudson within Hudson

Question

There are a number of plugins for Hudson to create coverage, test result, metrics and other reports.

It seems that all of them require you to add extra configuration to your build scripts (or Maven POM) for every project that you want to have the reporting done. For example, if you want to have a FindBugs or a Cobertura report, you need to add the report-generating step to your projects.

Is it really necessary to update every single POM file? That is a lot of repeating oneself, and it requires updating the target project's source repository (where the POM is located).

Is it possible to instead have a setting just within Hudson to enable report generation? It seems that since all you are required to do is enable the respective Maven plugin with its default settings. Cannot this be done externally by Hudson.

Answer 1

This is not possible - the Hudson philosophy is that your build tools should generate the reports. Hudson will pick those up and render them in the UI.

Answer 2

I think this is what sonar is trying to solve. It does generate all kinds of reports (Code coverage/pmd/checkstyle, etc) for your projects without having to add configuration to your projects. This helps a lot to cut down duplication if you have many projects to check.