Sharing build artifacts between jobs in Hudson

Question

I\'m trying to set up our build process in hudson.

Job 1 will be a super fast (hopefully) continuous integration build job that will be built frequently.

Job

Answer 1

Yes, that wiki page wasn't very helpful in that it tries to make it sound very elegant. The truth is that Hudson doesn't support job chains very elegantly yet if you have to pass stuff from one job to another.

I'm also doing the zip-up-and-copy-workspace method to transfer workspaces from one job to another. I have a quick build, full analysis build, and then distribution builds. In between, I use Ant to generate timestamps and "build-stamps" to mark which job's number built which other job's number. The fingerprinting feature helps keep track of files, but since I'm not going to archive the workspace zips, fingerprinting is useless to the users because they can't actually see the workspace zips.

Answer 2

I agree that the current copy files/artifact/workspace between jobs manually is less than elegant.

Also, I found it wasteful space/timewise to have to archive huge tgz/zip files.. In our case, these files were huge (1.5G) and took a long time to pack/archive/fingerprint/unpack.

So I settled with a slightly optimised variant of the same:

• Job 1/2/3 all check out/clone the same source repository, but
• Job 1 only packs files that are actually build artifacts
  • with Git makes this easy and fast by git ls-files -oz, not sure about others SCMs
• use Copy Artifact plugin to transfer files
• This reduces the those files to a 1/3 size in our case -> speedup, less space wasted