We're always looking for new tools to make our development environment more robust here at Caktus. We write a lot of tests to ensure proper functionality as new features land and bug fixes are added to our projects. The next step is to integrate with a continuous integration system to automate the process and regularly check that status of the build.

After attending Dr. C. Titus Brown's "Why not run all your tests all the time? A study of continuous integration systems." talk at Pycon and seeing Django's Hudson setup, I figured I'd take a look at Hudson CI.

Installing Hudson and basic setup

Hudson is very easy to setup. I started with a fresh Ubuntu 9.10 install on the smallest Rackspace cloud instance and had it running after a few commands. I followed the Debian setup instructions, which basically consists of:

$ wget -O - http://hudson-ci.org/debian/hudson-ci.org.key | sudo apt-key add - $ echo "deb http://hudson-ci.org/debian binary/" >> /etc/apt/sources.list $ apt-get update $ aptitude install hudson $ apt-get upgrade

That's it! It's already up and running on port 8080 using it's own web server. Go ahead and pull it up in your browser.

As a test, let's setup django-crm (a Caktus open-source community project) as our first Hudson job. Click "New Job", type in a job name, click "Build a free-style software project", and hit OK. django-crm contains a sample project that we'll use to run the test suite. On the job configuration page, check Subversion in the Source Code Management section and type in the Repository URL:

Click Save, run the job by clicking "Build Now", and check out the Console Output:

Started by user anonymous Checking out a fresh workspace because /var/lib/hudson/jobs/django-crm/workspace/sample_project doesn't exist Checking out http://django-crm.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/sample_project A manage.py A site_media A site_media/css A site_media/css/jquery.autocomplete.css A site_media/css/django-contactinfo.css A site_media/js A site_media/js/jquery-ui-1.7.2.custom.min.js A site_media/js/jquery-1.3.2.min.js A site_media/js/django-crm.js A site_media/js/jquery.autocomplete.min.js ... Finished: SUCCESS

Cool, now let's run some tests. Too keep things simple, let's grab Django and a few dependencies using aptitude:

$ wget http://www.djangoproject.com/download/1.1.1/tarball/ $ tar xzvf Django-1.1.1.tar.gz $ cd Django-1.1.1 $ sudo python setup.py install $ aptitude install python-dev python-imaging python-setuptools python-pip

To run the tests, add an "Execute shell" build step in the Build section with this command:

#!/bin/bash -ex cd sample_project python manage.py test crm

Run the job again and look for the test results in the console output:

[workspace] $ /bin/sh -xe /tmp/hudson6670261053226891793.sh + cd sample_project + python manage.py test crm ... Finished: SUCCESS

XML Test output

To integrate Hudson with the Django test suite, I used unittest-xml-reporting. Just "pip install unittest-xml-reporting" and add the following lines to your settings file:

TEST_RUNNER = 'xmlrunner.extra.djangotestrunner.run_tests' TEST_OUTPUT_VERBOSE = True TEST_OUTPUT_DESCRIPTIONS = True TEST_OUTPUT_DIR = 'xmlrunner'

Then check "Publish JUnit test result report" in the Post-build Actions section and add the path to the test XML output "sample_project/xmlrunner/*.xml":

Run the job and you should see a new "Test Result" link in the navigation. Now you can view the test results right in your browser window.

Coverage

To add coverage reports, I used Ned Batchelder's coverage.py (pip install coverage). Navigate to Hudson's plugin manager (Hudson -> Manage Hudson -> Manage Plugins), install the Cobertura Plugin, and restart Hudson when prompted. Then modify your shell script like so:

#!/bin/bash -ex cd sample_project coverage run manage.py test crm coverage xml --omit = /usr/

This will generate an XML coverage report in the working directory, so we just need to tell Hudson where to look for it. Check "Publish Cobertura Coverage Report" in the Post-build Actions section and enter the path to the report:

Run the build again and you should have access to a new "Coverage Report" link.

More to come...

This was just a simple example of getting Hudson setup with a Django project and I know a lot more can be done with Hudson (check out the large number of available plugins). The top items on my todo list are: see Hudson setup environments with virtualenv and pip, integrate more closely with the test suite (possibly using nose), check for PEP compliance, and setup build failure notifications. I hope to write more as I continue to setup our Hudson environment!

References

A few useful Hudson/Python/Django links I discovered while running through this setup: