Question

I am setting up the development environment for my start-up just now. I use Hudson for continuous integration of source code. It polls the SVN repository for changes every 10 minutes and if there are any deploys them to the LIVE servers from our DEV servers.

What I would like though is to have another Hudson job which deploys from DEV to TEST. I want to be able to commit code to SVN and then manually deploy to TEST, do a manual QA check and then it to be transferred to LIVE.

Is there a way I can do this with branches and the trunks in SVN? I would like it to still poll every 10 minutes as there are plenty of occasions when it should go straight from DEV to LIVE. I thought maybe I could commit to a branch then have hudson automate the deployment to TEST and then if it works out fine commit the branch to the trunk. Am I right??

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I don’t understand why you want a separate test step if there are still “plenty of occasions when it should go straight from DEV to LIVE” – which, as @Hightechrider says, sounds risky. The way I would do it is:

• Have Hudson detect changes every 10 minutes and deploy to TEST
• Carry out your manual testing
• Write another Hudson job which deploys the SVN revision you just tested from TEST to LIVE based on a trigger, for example sending an email to your Hudson server, if the tests pass (see the Hudson Wiki for details)

If your manual tests fail in step 2, I’m assuming you’ll want to have your developers fix the code and repeat steps 1 and 2 before deploying to production.

I’m wondering if we’re misunderstanding your scenario – if so, please add some more details on why you sometimes want to deploy to TEST and other times straight to LIVE.