Added by Erik Drolshammer, last edited by Erik Drolshammer on Apr 21, 2009  (view change)

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Introduction

There are plenty of CI servers to choose from. We have selected the three from the five most popular from the following poll:
Poll: What Continuous Integration Server are you using in 2008?

and tried to give a rough overview of pros and cons. Note that all three solve the basic task of automating builds, so which server to choose is a matter of personal taste and which properties the development team values the most.

Top three CI servers

  • Continuum
    • Open Source
    • Easy to install
    • Gathers 99% of necessary information from the pom.xml. Easy to initate new projects.
    • Allows grouping of projects (and configuration per group)
    • Easy to set up different kinds of builds in the same project (Build Definitions)
    • Supports maven-release from GUI
    • Large community
    • Poorly documented
    • Used to release very seldom
    • Cross-version migration issues
  • Hudson
    • Open Source
    • Easy to install
    • Lots of plugins
    • Good REST-api
    • Supports slave agents (easy to set up too)
    • Frequent releases and great deployment mechanisms (WebStart for instance)
    • Quick and snappy pages
    • Good console output
    • Each job (project) must be configured from scratch. Duplicates configuration when having many jobs for one project (can copy, but not share)
    • Doesn't scale with number of archived builds (having too large history will slow Hudson down as reports are based on numerous xml files)
  • Bamboo
    • Good documentation
    • Tidy configuration
    • Very easy installation procedure
    • Solid and enterprisey, scales well into many many projects (distributed builds on agents)
    • Excellent reporting and output capabilities
    • Supports Continuum-like multpiple "plans" for a single project (prevents config duplication)
    • Commercial(but not that expensive really)
    • Aquired taste: Not immediately intuitive GUI

Others

Resources

http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CC/CI+Feature+Matrix (previously hosted at codehaus )