Publishing Build Artifacts With Hudson

Tonight, I found yet another reason to love the Hudson continuous integration server. Publishing build artifacts is way easy. What's better, the latest artifacts are available under a static link. So, it's easy to set a bookmark and always have the latest output available without digging through the server.

I've setup publicly visible builds for EasySpec along with the Groovy example and Java example projects. All of these projects use EasySpec for Behavior Driven Design. A major component of BDD is having the latest behavior report available. So, I have included a build target named "report" in each of these projects. This target simply runs EasySpec to generate the behavior report into a known location in the workspace.

Let's take the Groovy example and walk through it. After every checkin, the Hudson build does

gant clean test report

This cleans the working copy, then compiles everything, runs the tests, and finally generated the EasySpec report. Relative to the working copy base, the report ends up in build_output/reports/EasySpec/index.html

To publish this report, only a couple of simple steps are required. First, go to the project configuration page for the build that you wish to publish artifacts from. In this case, that's Hudson/GroovyExample/Configure. Then, find the checkbox, "Post-build Actions / Archive the artifacts" Enter the relative path of the artifacts that you wish to publish. In this case, that's "
build_output/reports/EasySpec/index.html" Click "Save" and it's all done.

Now, everytime this project builds successfully, the latest EasySpec report is published to a constant URL. If you want, checkout the latest example EasySpec report.

I love Hudson