Tomcat web-based build

Intro

About a year ago we started nightly builds for tomcat. We than started to run tests, build other projects. The whole thing was rewritten 3 times. Gump is a great tool that does the same thing ( in a different way ) - but it has the same problem as most scripts I know: hard to setup, hard to customize.

This project tries to improve the situation in few ways:

• Use a self-contained web application. The whole thing will be packaged as a WAR, with ant, jaxp and other dependencies in WEB-INF/lib, and with a single configuration point ( and a web-based form will be added to set it up ).
• Open up the build process and split it in individual steps. You should be able to run any step manually, at any time. In time we can add "wizard" like interfaces, and logic to verify the dependencies are realized.

Goals

• Easy to use tool - get the WAR, deploy it, use the wizard to set up the environment, run the steps you need.
• Integration with the "normal" development environment. This should work similar with the "antidote" - except that it'll be web based.
• Integration with gump. Xml descriptions of the projects will be used to generate the UI ( probably we'll use ant-based scripts instead of bat/bash ).

  Status

  The current scripts are usable ( and used for nightly tomcat build and test ). The user interface is not done, we just have a set of links to various scripts. Gump integration isn't started, but few experiments were made ( I would do it after some work on interface is done ).

  Architecture

  We use few jsp taglibs to allow calls to ant and create the UI.

  Few custom ant tasks and scripts allow execution of ant out-of-process, using different java VMs, starting and stoping tomcat ( or executing different programs ).

  ---

  Links:
  • Workspace.
  • Logs.
  • Distribution files.
  Nightly:
  1. Clean tomcat workspace.
  2. Get the source from CVS or snapshots
     • Get jakarta-tomcat sources from CVS or Get from snapshot
  3. Create source packages
     • Create source package for tomcat.
  4. Test special builds
     • Clean tomcat build/dist
     • JDK1.1.
     • Create binary snapshots. ( before testing or building test apps )
     • Clean tomcat build/dist
     • Build tomcat, no JSSE.
     • Create binary snapshots. ( before testing or building test apps )
  5. Build and create binary packages
     • Clean tomcat build/dist
     • Full build, all packages( JSSE ).
     • Create binary snapshots. ( before testing or building test apps )
     • Build test applications

  Prepare

  Download binaries tomcat build and testing depends on. This should be updated for every new stable release of a binary package. In "gump" mode, this should be done nightly using the latest builds.
  1. Configure and download the binary packages
     • Get jakarta-ant binaries
     • Get crimson binaries
  2. Clean ws and dist dirs (?).
  3. Get the source from CVS or snapshots
     • Get jakarta-tomcat sources from CVS or Get from snapshot
     • Get jakarta-watchdog source from CVS
     • Get jakarta-tools source from CVS
     • Get jakarta-servletapi source from CVS
  4. Create source packages
     • Create source package for watchdog.
  5. Build and create binary packages
     • Build servletapi ( needed for watchdog build )
     • Full build, all packages( JSSE ).
     • Build test applications
     • Build watchdog

  Agregate targets

  • Full build, get sources from snapshot
  • Full build, get sources from cvs

  Testing

  • Get and install tomcat binary ( watchdog wars, sanity-test) from the binary distribution
  • Get test applications ( watchdog wars, sanity-test)
  • Get the port ( watchdog wars, sanity-test)
  • Start tomcat
  • Run watchdog
  • Stop tomcat

  Other

  • Rebuild myself. Will rebuild the build webapp.
  • Clean all temp files.
  • Install test servlet-tests jsp-tests
  • Remove test servlet-tests jsp-tests

  Prepare

  
  If you are behind a socks firewall, remember to do "runsocks tomcat.sh run" ( or socksify ). If you are behind a firewall, and you have a HTTP proxy, rememver to set TOMCAT_OPTS="-Dhttp.proxyHost=MYPROXY -Dhttp.proxyPort=PROXYPORT"
  1. Download and install Ant, JSSE,
  2. Make sure you have JDK1.1 and JDK1.2(or later) installed
  3. Edit the file TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/build/WEB-INF/scripts/ant.properties and set all the properties to match your system.
     XXX a web based page can be created - contributions welcomed.