Gant is a Groovy-based build system that uses Ant’s extensive collection of flower power tasks without all of the nasty XML– this enables you to leverage greater flexibly when it comes to hiply assembling software. Capitalizing on this flexibility within a CI process, however, can be somewhat challenging, unless, that is, you happen to be using Hudson, baby!
Hudson is an open source CI server that is particularly interesting given its ease of configuration and its compelling plug-ins, which provide increased visibility into such aspects as test result trends, for instance. What’s more, because it’s Hudson’s bag, baby, it has a copasetic Gant plug-in that enables you to easily employ Gant as a build process for any CI project.
Setting up the Gant plug-in is easy too– all it takes is 5 steps.
First, download the plug-in.
Next, you need to upload the smokin’ plug-in into Hudson– to do this, you need to go to your Hudson server’s home page and select the Manage Hudson link. This link is on the upper left corner of the page. Once you hit that link, you’ll be presented to with a list of options for managing Hudson. Select the Manage Plugins link, baby.
Once you’ve hit that link, you should see a small form that allows you to select the plug-in on your local machine and upload it. Do that!
So far, pretty easy, eh? Don’t worry, it doesn’t get any more difficult either– the next step is to globally configure the plug-in. This involves doing one thing– pointing Hudson to your installation of Gant, which if you’re following Gant’s instructions, is essentially is your Groovy installation. Therefore, go back to the Manage Hudson link and click the System Configuration link.
From there, find the Gant section. There are two form elements that require information– the name of your Gant instance and GROOVY_HOME (which is where you installed Groovy, man).
You’ll notice that you can multiple instances of Gant configured; hence, I usually make the name the version number of the underlying Gant instance in use.
Lastly, you’ve got to configure a particular job to use that version of Gant. During a job setup, you’ll note in the Build section, you can now select the Invoke Gant script checkbox. What a trip!
Once you select the checkbox, you’ll be presented with two form elements– which Gant version to use (this is drop down list with the various names from your global configuration) and which commands to invoke. By the way, you’ll note that the form says “Ant Version”– don’t be fooled though– simple typo, man. Once you are done configuring the job, don’t forget to hit the save button. I usually like to force a build to verify things are copasetic.
That’s it, baby! You are all done and ready to go with Gant and Hudson. Can you dig it?
