build-o-matic

build-o-matic is a simple continuous integration server which is easy to configure and customize.

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Why?

build-o-matic is very simple to get to work for a project that uses ant and subversion. It also has some very useful features:

• build-o-matic tells you what it's doing

  • The modifications that caused build-o-matic to build are shown as soon as they are detected, i.e. before build-o-matic starts running the build rather than at the end.

  • The tail of the build output is shown on the build-o-matic web page so you can see how the build is progressing. The whole build output is available via the web page too.

• build-o-matic tells you what the status of the build is

  • The background of the web page is green or red depending on whether the build is OK or broken.

  • There are links on the web page for each revision that caused build-o-matic to build – labelled using the subversion revision number.

• build-o-matic tells you who did what

  • 
    build-o-matic shows you pictures of who checked in the modifications that caused build-o-matic to build (see here) with the commit messages.

• build-o-matic helps you find out why the build was broken

  • if the build is broken, and there are no modifications waiting to be built, build-o-matic runs the build for the revision between the last known good and first known broken revision.

Why not?

build-o-matic might not do what you want. There's no integration with useless source control systems. There are no xml configuration files (the complete source code of build-o-matic is still smaller than some xml configuration files I've seen for a well known continuous integration server). build-o-matic tells you what it's doing – maybe you want it to fail mysteriously with OutOfMemoryErrors half way through builds with no indication of what it was doing at the time. I don't know. It's up to you. There are plenty of other continuous integration servers. See a matrix of many of them.

Project prejudices

1. We aim to keep build-o-matic simple; simple to use and simple code so it's easy to customize.

2. build-o-matic integrates with source control systems and build tools that we use; we won't implement integration for source control systems that we don't use

3. build-o-matic has been written by people who are using it – it's features are those that we want, we hope you like them too

FAQ

Q) It's written in Python but my project is a Java one; can I use it?

A) If you use subversion and ant, then “yes”. build-o-matic supports subversion and ant “out of the box”.

Q) Does it support <some build tool other than ant>?

A) Not “out of the box” - but it's probably easier than you think to get it to work.

Q) Does it support <some source control system other than subversion>?

A) Not “out of the box” - but it's probably easier than you think to get it to work.