Setting up CruiseControl.rb with/for Git Based Projects

[Updated to refer to official ThoughtWorks CC.rb Git repo.]

I have a new Rails project I'm working on and I use Git/GitHub for source control. It was time to setup continuous integration, and my usual weapon of choice for that is CruiseControl.rb. Here's what I did to get my project setup under CruiseControl.rb with Git, on an Ubuntu 7.10 machine...

Setup for accessing GitHub repo

All I needed to do here was generate an SSH key for my account on the host machine, and then add that key to the allowed keys for my GitHub account.

Prerequisites

• I setup a builder@mydomain.com email address which will get used by CruiseControl for sending build related emails/notifications.


• You'll need to determine a port you want CruiseControl to run on, and your strategy for accessing it. For example, I run mine on a port other than port 80, and other than the default 3333. I then proxy that via Nginx, and also use Nginx to password protect access to it (since this is not a public project, etc. This will affect the CC dashboard URL setting specified below. Some notes on this:




• I did my initial Nginx configuration using err's Nginx config generator. However, this makes a lot of path assumptions, and various other things, so you'll definitely want to go through the resulting file closely. I had a few sites on this server, so it was relatively useful to use this as a base starting point, and then just fix up paths to the access and error logs, and the PID file.


• Here's a quicky on how to add password protection to an Nginx server (and a specific location).

Install CruiseControl and Do Site Configuration

1. Cloned the Git version of CruiseControl.rb in location I wanted it (you could also simply download it and expand the tarball): git clone git://github.com/benburkert/cruisecontrolrb.git


2. The DEPENDENCIES file indicated I needed to have the grit and mime-types gems, so installed those.


3. Where your projects get stored for CruiseControl.rb is now defined by the CRUISE_DATA_ROOT environment variable, and if you don't set this, it defaults to $HOME/.cruise. I personally changed this to be /var/cruisecontrolrb.
   
4. Edit the config/site_configuration.rb (probably need to rename the example version accordingly) to set site-wide settings, such as your email config and so on.
   
   
   
   • For email setup, I use Gmail for domains, so I have a block like this:
     

     
     ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
       :address =>        "smtp.gmail.com",
       :port =>           587,
       :domain =>         "mydomain.com",
       :authentication => :plain,
       :user_name =>      "builder@ mydomain.com",
       :password =>       "password"
     }

   
   
   • You'll want to specify the Configuration.dashboard_url setting so URL's work properly.
   
   
   • There are a variety of other settings available in the file that you may want to tweak.
   
   
   
   

Add Project and Configure

1. Did the usual usual cruise add command to add my project, but with the Git variant: ./cruise add MyProjectName --git-url git@github.com:mylogin/myproject.git (modify the Git project URL for your Git repo of course). Note that you can see all the options by doing a ./cruise add


2. Create the test database for your project. The easiest way is just to go into $CRUISE_DATA_ROOT/projects/MyProjectName/work and do a rake db:create RAILS_ENV=test. Your first build will have already failed because this hasn't been made, this step hopefully fixes that.


3. If your log directory isn't in Git, you'll need to go mkdir it, so something like:mkdir $CRUISE_DATA_ROOT/projects/MyProjectName/work/log.

Setup CruiseControl.rb Service/Daemon

1. Copy the cruisecontrolrb file into /etc/init.d.


2. I set the port for CruiseControl.rb to run on in the above /etc/init.d/cruisecontrolrb daemon file, by adding "--port 1234" (for example) to the DAEMON_ARGS variable.
   
3. Start the CruiseControl.rb daemon as appropriate for your system (e.g. "sudo /etc/init.d/cruisecontrolrb start").

Finally, surf to your cc.rb site on the web and see how your build has done. If you run into build problems, you'll want to look at the cc.rb build logs (if it was your project test/build that failed) which are in the $CRUISE_DATA_ROOT/projects/MyProjectName directory (or rather, the subdirectory in there for the particular build). And Enjoy!