Automatic Hudson CI setup and plugin updates through apt?

Question

We've used Hudson for quite a while to implement a CI server with all the bells and whistles. The setup is quite straight forward, when installing from the provided RPMs and Debs, but through googling I haven't been able to figure out whether the plugins are installable using apt/rpm or some other package manager?

The reason is that I would like to create a (meta)package for Ubuntu which would install and also update both Hudson and all the plugins through the normal upgrade mechanism. At the same time I could create a template setup for other projects, say JavaEE project needs git, cobertura and Chuck Norris plugins, while my Python project needs plugins XXX and YYY.

Anybody got such a setup? As a workaround I figured setting up a number of Maven POMs, which would do the init, and later upgrades, but I feel this would require more scripting on the side, which I'm not very eager to do.

Any other suggestions for this would also be appreciated.

Answer 1

I haven't been able to figure out whether the plugins are installable using apt/rpm or some other package manager?

They are installed "manually".

The reason is that I would like to create a (meta)package for Ubuntu which would install and also update both Hudson and all the plugins through the normal upgrade mechanism. (...)

I'm not aware of an existing solution for this (very likely because packaging plugins is a big mistake in general: it's a lot of work for the linux distros and plugins go much faster than the release cycles). So I guess you'll have to package them yourself.

And be careful with upgrades of Hudson, they often break plugins (in other words, I recommend to test the upgrade of Hudson in a test environment, like a virtual machine).

Anybody got such a setup? (...)

I bundle plugins in an archive and unzip them in <HUDSON_HOME>/plugins/.