August 2010

Hudson at JavaZone, Meetup in Oslo

JavaZone is a big Java conference in Scandinavia, and Hudson is well represented there. On September 8th, Håkon Snøtun will be presenting "Top 5 plugins for Hudson and Chuck Norris." and on September 9th, I'll be presenting "Getting more out of your Hudson."

But more importantly, what is a conference without drinking!? So in that spirit, InfraDNA will be organizing a Hudson User Meetup at The Scotsman from Sep 8th 19:30 (website.) We'll get together, have some drinks, and enjoy geeky conversations.

So if you are local or visiting Oslo for JavaZone, come join us. If you plan to join us at The Scotsman, please RSVP, and watch out for my twitter updates for any last minute time/location changes.

Pre-JavaOne Hudson Meetup

As we near autumn up here in the Northern Hemisphere, the wind is starting to blow a bit chillier and here in the Bay Area that can only mean one thing: Oracle is suing everybody! it's time for JavaOne!

A whole lot has changed since last year, Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle, Kohsuke left Snoracle to found InfraDNA and Hudson has continued to power on as the single best continuous integration server on the planet.

While the tickets for Oracle OpenWorld/JavaOne are just as outrageously expensive as they were last year, we are hosting a meetup/hackathon/continuous-drinking-contest at Digg the Sunday prior. We have not yet set any kind of agenda, but some core Hudson hackers and plenty of plugin developers should be in town so it should be a great time hacking on and/or with Hudson.

RSVP Here!

Hudson User Meet-up in Copenhagen/Oslo

I'll be in Copenhagen from 9/5-9/7 and in Oslo 9/8-9/9 to present in JavaZone. I'd like to take advantage of the opportunities and have user meet-up events in those cities. Depending on the number of participants, it could be just a drink in a bar, or a talk in a meeting room.

So if you are:

  1. in those cities,
  2. available in the evening of 9/6, 9/8, or 9/9, and
  3. willing to attend such an event,

... then please let me know.

Also, if you have an office in those cities and willing to provide a space for an event, that would be extra appreciated!

CloudBees announce Hudson-as-a-Service

CloudBees announced the beta availability of their new Hudson-as-a-service "HaaS" today. I see this as yet another validation to Hudson, and as such, I welcome this new addition to the community and wish them well! — more companies betting on Hudson means we'll get more investment to the project, which is all goodness for Hudson users. It's been 5 months since I left Oracle to start InfraDNA, and I was initially worried about a possible negative impact on adoption, but instead Hudson has shown with no sign of slowing down (see picture on the right, from Andrew's report, which shows # of estimated active installations that participates to our usage stats survey).

Hudson / Sauce OnDemand webinar

On September 1st, I'll be presenting in a Sauce Labs webinar about Hudson and Sauce OnDemand. The talk will discuss how Hudson can be used with Sauce OnDemand, naturally, but it'll also cover broader Hudson/Selenium integrations.

Please register to this free event, and looking forward to seeing to you virtually.

Hudson Anonymous Usage Data

In late 2008, the Hudson team released version 1.264 which added an anonymous reporting feature (you can opt-out in the "Manage Hudson" screen). The reporting feature has been sending information back to the Hudson team to help us understand how Hudson is used in aggregate; the info being reported includes the number of jobs configured, slave configurations, what plugins (and what versions of those plugins) are installed, and more. This data has not been available publicly until now! The raw data needed to be decrypted and scrubbed of any potentially identifying information, such as non-public plugin names or usernames in snapshot versions. We've finally scrubbed the data and are making it available!

The data is currently in monthly JSON bundles, organized by unique install key. We've filtered out reports of installations without any jobs configured, as well as any installations with only one report in a given month.

Hudson 1.372 sets sail

Last Friday the Hudson team rolled out a small 1.372 with two enhancements following the critical 1.371 release on Monday. Not a whole lot to say about this release other than go get it!

Enhancements

  • Persist matrix-based security settings in a consistent order (issue 7138)
  • Jobs can now use boolean expression over labels to control where they run.

HudsonMobi 2.0 hits the Android Market

The folks over at LMT Software just released their HudsonMobi 2.0 to the Android market. This release of HudsonMobi brings a lot of the features to Android that iPhone/iPad users of HudsonMobi have enjoyed for some time.

Features unleashed to Android users in this revision of the app are:

  • Full Android user-experience with Menu and back controls
  • Embedded artifact viewer! For archived build artifacts that are text-based, you can view them directly on your handset.
  • Access to the build history and changes for a job.
  • Quick and easy access to a job's last build\
  • Restyled and updated user-experience, making HudsonMobi "feel better" on an Android device


If you want to get HudsonMobi for free from the Android Market, whip our your phone and take a picture of its QR code:



Quiet Period Feature

Commits often come in a burst. This seems to happen mainly for two reasons --- people sometimes forget to commit some files, and in the tranquility of waiting for your SCM to finish a commit, people sometimes realize the problems in the commit and they quickly make follow-up changes. The conventional wisdom is that the CI server should wait for the burst to finish before attempting a build. This is said to reduce the chance of having broken build, and it is also sometimes useful in reducing the average turn-around time for builds that take longer.

As such, Hudson is capable of waiting for a commit burst to be over before it triggers a new build, and this feature is called "quiet period." There are two parts in Hudson that interacts with the quiet period. One is the SCM polling behavior and the other is the queue.

The queue portion of the quiet period is straight-forward. When a build is scheduled into the queue with quiet period, the build will sit in the queue until the quiet period expires. If during this period, additional attempts are made to put the same build in the queue, the quiet period resets to its initial value. For example, if the quiet period is 5 minutes, and the build is put into the queue 9:00am and 9:03am, the actual build will only happen after 9:08am.

Big Security Fix! Hudson 1.371 Released

Hot on the heels of Hudson 1.370, which was released last Friday, the Hudson team released 1.371 which addresses a critical vulnerability in all Hudson versions prior to 1.371. The vulnerability was disclosed by InfraDNA in the following security advisory, which details the issue:

This critical vulnerability allows an attacker to use CLI commands that they are otherwise unauthorized for. CLI commands can perform various administrative operations.

It is advised that all Hudson instances be upgraded immediately to avoid data loss or other ill effects from this issue. If you're upgrading from a version earlier than 1.370, you can consult the changelog for details on the other bug fixes and enhancements covered by the upgrade of your version to 1.371.

If you run a Hudson instance, it is recommended that Hudson system admins subscribe to either the security advisories RSS feed or the advisories@ mailing list