Luntbuild 1.2, a build automation and management server with a web application as front end, has been released with new features of Maven support, project dependency configuration, role based security, and more. One of its build management features is that it's able to categorize build results, such that you might be able to label a given build as being flawed or beta quality.

Luntbuild is designed to be installed quickly, such that a build portal can be set up for a team to enable continuous integration tasks. Since continuous integration tends to yield a lot of builds (see "Daily builds with Luntbuild"), the labeling feature can be very important.

Key features in release 1.2 are:

• Supported build tools: Ant, Maven, Shell script
• Supported version control systems: Visual Sourcesafe, Clearcase(base and UCM), file system, CVS, Accurev, StarTeam, Perforce, Subversion
• Role-based security mechanism available to let you define project admins/builders/viewers for each project
• Be able to define dependencies between different projects
• Builds can be categorized, searched, and re-produced
• Builds can be promoted - For example, a build might be noted as going from "test" phase to "release" phase
• Flexible build versioning strategy can be defined
• Notifications can be sent via e-mail, MSN messenger, or Jabber
• Remoting API available to integrate your existing system with Luntbuild
• Export/import data through XML file

One very unusual aspect of Luntbuild is that it's not just "open source," but public domain, according to its summary page on Sourceforge.

Luntbuild's installation as a standalone web application seems to imply certain capabilities on the part of the container, because it doesn't require the deployer to set up a database reference.

What do you think about the product as a whole? Do you use continuous integration now? Why or why not? Does its license - more permissive than most other open source licenses - affect your opinion of the project?

For about a month now I have been running continuous builds on my project which contains about a dozen modules. It was easy to install, easy to setup, it is easy to maintain and I can't think of any major flaws that would prevent me from continuing to use it. After trying various CI systems, I can easily say that LuntBuild is one of the best.

Yep, same story here.
I tried various CI systems and found LuntBuild to be the easiest for our situation. (Multi-location environment, using perforce as the VCS and dependencies between various (sub-)projects).
We have other projects that are using CruiseControl, but the decision to switch and all go with LuntBuild was made last week.

I gather you've used both - we are using CC right now (with Maven projects). How do the two tools compare?

Has anyone made a comparison between the two?

Here is a feature comparison --> http://damagecontrol.codehaus.org/Continuous+Integration+Server+Feature+Matrix

I has finding Continuous Integration Tools, CruiseControl were the tool that i was to adopt, but now ...............

i'm gone spend some time trying this one, looks great.

Maven support is great too.

But the CVS i can see suport for extssh :( conection. My company admins don't like pserve :(. We access to the CVS with SSH and rsa key.

We've been using Luntbuild 1.2 beta for a couple of months now. Is extremely easy to setup and has worked very well for us. The tool is right up there with other CI toolkits like CruiseControl. Congrats once again!

Congrats guys! I've been using it and Im very happy.

Nice tool.

I only miss one Cruise Control feature which is the ability to send an email to developers who broke the build. It means sending an email only to the people who committed changes in the sources repository (and an email to QA people when the build is successful).

We adopted back in December. It's incredibly simple to setup and manage and can be used by non-developer types to check status.

The project team has been very responsive to suggestions and bug reports.

Can't wait to try the new security features.

We recently switched from cruisecontrol to luntbuild too, and find it much easier to configure because of the web interface, also the monitoring of builds is far easier for us with luntbuild.

We found with cruisecontrol that it took 5 minutes to build our code, but then half an hour to create an enormous xml log file. Also these logs were quickly filling up our hard disk.

I particularly like the luntbuild feature where you can tell it to keep the last x number of build results only.

Lastly, you can really see the robustness of this webapp, due I'm sure to its use of Hibernate, Spring and Tapestry.

Mike Stephen.

Luntbuild is very nice. I had set up CruiseControl in the past, and I was looking for something easier, and definitely found it in Luntbuild.

It's important to realize that Luntbuild is not just a continuous integration system. It's a full automated build and build management system. I've got our QA looking at using it for all of their builds (not scheduled, triggered manually) and for build management and promotion. It's a nice dashboard on your different project builds.

Some of the relatively unique features I like:

1) project build dependencies -> tell it which other builds this build depends on, then tell it if you'd like to build all dependencies before this build, build all projects which depend on this build after the build, both, or none

2) Accurev support -> ok, I built this, but none of the free ones I looked at supported it...

3) Build promotion -> so this QA build passed all regression tests and got approved by QA for release... now just go to that build in Luntbuild and promote it to the "gold release" project and you're done

All in all Luntbuild is very well done. The name's a little strange (ever thought of changing it?)... The UI's functional but a little clunky and not pretty, but that's probably just because they use Tapestry :-)

Congrats to Robin and co., this is a great CI tool, very easy to set up and very functional tool too. For what it's worth, its also a good example of a spring and tapestry application, well worth looking at the code if you get a chance.

i agree the name and UI aren't great tho!

Well, i tried to install the application from the jar file, but obiously there is stg wrong, i cannot locate the web application after the installation.
Sadly no documentation about the jar installation (or any installation) in the site either. i will check some more.

Installation instructions are in release_notes.txt.
Indeed a strange place to put installation instructions ;-)

Check Parabuild - it is a commercial build server. Viewtier is running EAP now and is offering free licenses for bugs found:

http://www.viewtier.com/products/parabuild/index.htm

And it has the installation manual in the right place :)

Regards,

Slava Imeshev

Well, i tried to install the application from the jar file, but obiously there is stg wrong, i cannot locate the web application after the installation. Sadly no documentation about the jar installation (or any installation) in the site either. i will check some more.

I also had the problem, it is not to hard to overcome. Just download the zipfile. Change the web.xml file and applicationConfiguration.xml (see my blog for details)

http://www.gridshore.nl/blog/?postid=12

After that use a zip (winzip for instance) and zip the complete contents of the web directory. Change the name of the file to luntbuild.war and there you have the war file you need.

Hope this helps
Jettro Coenradie

If you are using installer, during the installation, you can select to deploy your war file into application server. Also the war file will be generated into your installation directory so that you can deploy it manually.

I have been using Luntbuild 1.2 beta1 for a few weeks and it works really well. We are planning to standardize on it. Thanks for the great software.

Venkat Tipparam

I have two different instances of luntbuild running on two different machines. I have a 3rd machine which I want to put luntbuild on which contains the configurations from both machines. Is there any easy way to merge the configurations? At present it seems the import mechanism seems to overwrite existing configuration before the import takes place.