Building Products with Buckminster/Hudson

I just finished setting up our Buckminster/Hudson build server. Due to lack of documentation it was a real struggle, sharing some of my experience may help other developers.

I used Ralf's tutorial to get an good overview about the topic, great blog.

First up some information about the project I'm working on. It's a server-client application (two separated products) called scodi, which is based on our framework softmodeler. For a more detailed overview you can read my previous post, if your interested.

Target Platform

How to setup Hudson and Buckminster can be read in Ralf's tutorial. Little tip, to prevent OutOfMemoryErrors, add -Xmx1024m to the "additional parameters" of your Buckminster installation (see troubleshooting tip Hudson out of memory).

I have a separated free style job to publish my target platform for other jobs. In the "Source-Code-Management" section I checkout the feature which contains my target defintion (in my case ch.scodi.client.site).
To actually resolve the target definition, I added a build step "Run Buckminster" with the following command:
importtargetdefinition -A '${WORKSPACE}ch.scodi.client.site/TargetDefinition.target'

In the "Post-Build-Action" checked "Archive and publish an Eclipse Target Platform" and added ".metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.pde.core/.bundle_pool" as path.

Consider that the TargetDefinition can not resolve directory locations. My target definition used to have a directory location containing bundles from the springsource repository.
I tried using the rmap file to get the bundles during materialization but had some trouble with that, so I decided to create an own update site for those bundles and add this site to the target definition. More on that can be found here: http://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php?t=msg&th=164508&start=0&

Building the Product

After the target definition job is run, we can start building the products.
This is pretty straight forward, see Ralf's tutorial on how to checkout your source from SVN.
I have three different builds for each, server and client product: Integration, Nightly and Release.
For each build the plug-in qualifier should be different (e.g. I20100326-2, N20100326, R20100326-01).
To accomplish this I installed the flowing plug-in: http://wiki.hudson-ci.org/display/HUDSON/Version+Number+Plugin
In the integration job I choose "Create a formatted version number" name it "version" and use something like this "I${BUILD_YEAR, XXXX}${BUILD_MONTH, XX}${BUILD_DAY, XX}-${BUILDS_TODAY}" as format.

To finally build the client product I added a Buckminster build step, selected the previously published target platform and used the following as commands:
import '${WORKSPACE}source/scodi-rcp/features/ch.scodi.client.site/site.cquery'

build

perform -D target.os=* -D target.ws=* -D target.arch=* -D qualifier.replacement.*=${version} ch.scodi.client.site#site.p2.zip
perform -D target.os=win32 -D target.ws=win32 -D target.arch=x86 ch.scodi.client.site#create.product.zip
perform -D target.os=win32 -D target.ws=win32 -D target.arch=x86_64 ch.scodi.client.site#create.product.zip

Notice qualifier.replacement.*=${version}, this tells Buckminster/Eclipse to use my formated version as qualifier and results in plug-ins named like this "com.softmodeler.model_1.0.0.I20100325-3.jar", requires that Bundle-Version: 1.0.0.qualifier is defined in the bundle manifest.

Ok this post is getting long and I'm tired.
I will post some more next week about my JavaDoc build and running JUnit Tests.