makeitfaster

First off, after trying out most of the free build servers on the market, I’ve found that Hudson ( http://www.hudson-ci.org/ ) is the best for me. It’s by far the easiest to configure and it runs pretty smoothly. The plugin ecosystem is vibrant and there are constantly new and interesting plugins. I’ve used it for java, grails and even msbuild projects with success.

I’m learning about headless linux servers and hosting on them, so I’m using this an opportunity to document the sometimes tricky install procedures. I’m using Ubuntu 10.10 Server in a 32-bit edition. I must admit that I’m impressed by the performance of the headless linux server. It’s running in VMWare Player 3 with 512mb ram, on a USB drive, on my underpowered Lenovo T500 laptop… and it feels snappy!

I’ll assume that you’ve already done the steps for installing grails. If not, you at least need to do a succesful:

 sudo aptitude install sun-java6-jdk

I got some of this installation info from http://hudson-ci.org/debian/. First we need to install a prerequisite:

 sudo aptitude install daemon

Then we need to fetch a key (and install it) and a deb package (and install it). After that we update the apt repo list and do a “normal” install

 wget -O /tmp/key http://hudson-ci.org/debian/hudson-ci.org.key

 sudo apt-key add /tmp/key

 wget -O /tmp/hudson.deb http://hudson-ci.org/latest/debian/hudson.deb

 sudo dpkg --install /tmp/hudson.deb

 sudo apt-get update

 sudo apt-get install hudson

Once the package is installed, normal updating should work. Check that the install is okay by visiting:

 http://<hostname>:8080

Running hudson on port 8080 is not cool, since so many other servers want to run there (Tomcat for instance). So let’s change the port number:

First, stop the hudson server:

 sudo /etc/init.d/hudson stop

To change change port number for hudson to 9090, run this line:

sudo perl -pi -e 's/HTTP_PORT=(.*)\n/HTTP_PORT=9090\n/g' /etc/default/hudson

It does a search and replace in the /etc/default/hudson and replaces the port number. Call this to verify the new port number:

cat /etc/default/hudson |grep HTTP_PORT=

Then you can start Hudson again:

 sudo /etc/init.d/hudson start

In case you need to debug something or if you’re a log geek you can find the hudson log is in /var/log/hudson/hudson.log.  You may want to run

 tail -f /var/log/hudson/hudson.log

to keep viewing it

PS: Thanks to Theis Borg for helping me with the linux scripting!