cruisecontrol

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ricardo Trindade" <ricardo.trindade@...>
To: "Joris Kuipers" <kuiplist@...>
Sent: Wednesday, October 06, 2004 4:24 PM
Subject: RE: [Cruisecontrol-user] cruisecontrol without builder


> thanks for your answer
>
> yes, that's what I want, to publish docs when something has changed in the
> repository.
>
> the main difference between this and other projects I have, is that it
> doesn't have a build.xml, because it doesn't have code.

Like I said, you don't have to use a build script to compile code: copying 
files to your webserver can be done just as easily using an ant script.

> so I want to use the modificationset to know if something has changed, I
> want to use a publisher to copy everything to a directory (or scp), but I
> just don't know how to config cruisecontrol to work without a builder. if I
> just remove the <ant> tag from the <schedule>, it stops working.

Yes, CruiseControl is meant to run your build script. If you have no build 
script (ant or maven) you can't use CruiseControl, since there's nothing to 
control.

> I don't want to have publishing stuff in my build.xml, I'm trying to leave
> that to cruisecontrol. I can create a empty build.xml, but I think it would
> make sense for cruise to be able to work without a builders.

You shouldn't confuse publishing your web content to your site, which is the 
task that you want CruiseControl to control, with the sort of publishing that 
is done by CruiseControl Publishers. These are two different sorts of 
publishing, and your publishing is best done by an ant script, not by 
CruiseControl publishers.

> the exception I get is this :
> net.sourceforge.cruisecontrol.CruiseControlException: schedule element
> requires at least one nested builder element
>
> I don't think this makes sense, since apparently cruise can be usefull just
> for checking modifications and publishing something, so why force a
> (sometimes artificial) build ?

The CruiseControl publishers are only meant to publish information about the 
build: information like if the build ran OK, artifacts that resulted as a 
build product, etc. They are not meant to do what you want. CruiseControl only 
controls your build process, it doesn't perform tasks that are part of the 
build itself. In your case, your 'build' process involves copying files from 
your repository to your website, even though you understandably refer to this 
as publishing instead of building.

So, given your requirements, I think writing an ant script (you could call it 
publish.xml if you want) to publish your information and using CruiseControl 
to run this script when modifications are found seems like an excellent 
solution: it will do exactly what you want.
You can then define a publisher to let you know that your script was run and 
if it was succesful.

If you need to use scp or something like that: there are Ant tasks that are 
provided with the standard Ant distribution to do all this, which is another 
good reason to write an ant script to perform your publishing.

I hope that this makes things a bit clearer, and that you'll find that writing 
an ant script and letting CruiseControl call it when modifications are 
detected will provide a good solution to your problem.

Joris