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20060926 Tuesday September 26, 2006

NetBeans Plugins I Use, Part 5: Build Monitor

(Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.)

The Build Monitor plugin for NetBeans allows you to see the status of continuous builds, right from within the IDE. The Build Monitor works with several continuous build systems - CruiseControl, Hudson, and of course the NetBeans continous build. You can monitor multiple build sources - all you do is name your build and point to an RSS feed where the plugin can fetch the build status. Each build is then displayed right in the IDE status bar. You can set the polling frequency yourself; I've set mine to check every minute! Here's what this looks like:

This is obviously what you don't want to see - while the NetBeans continuous build is fine, the second continuous build is currently failing, as indicated by the red ball. In this case, just click on it to open the browser for the corresponding build status page - where you can for example click on the Console Log to see the build script output.

You can grab the Build Monitor plugin from the Beta Update Center, or from nbextras.org.

Yesterday, I set up a continuous build for the project I'm working on. It was really simple. All I had to do was download glassfish, run its setup script, download Hudson, and drop the hudson.war file into the autodeploy directory in Glassfish. Then I just went to localhost:8080/hudson and from there I could set up a build using a simple web interface. I just needed to point to my CVS server (Subversion is supported too) and my ant scripts, and voila - continuous builds. If you want to take a look at what Hudson looks like in action, visit this page where you can see Glassfish itself being built in a Hudson setup.

Tips:

  1. It's a bit tricky to configure the build monitor. The trick is to open the options, then go to the Advanced Options, locate the Build Monitor item, right click on it, choose new build monitor. Then set the RSS feed to the build failure (or all builds) feed you want to use - Hudson displays it right in the status page.
  2. I had to restart the IDE before the build monitors showed up in the Status Line. We should set the needs-restart property of the auto update bundle.
  3. I had problems using the most recent snapshot of Hudson so I grabbed a slightly older version and things were fine.

Thanks to Tom Ball and Jesse Glick for this plugin.

(2006-09-26 11:45:42.0) Permalink Comments [3]