Comparison of Hudson, CDash, CruisonControl, TeamCity for Continuous Integration / Builder
I found most people talk about Hudson for simple and free continuous integration. Now personally I'm not fond of its interface which I find very messy, and I found almost no one talking about CDash -- I love CMake and CTest seem nice too.
Could you give for your favorite continuous integration server/builder/tester/dashboard a short description of its strong and weak decision points.
Here is a list of free (in the broad meaning for a small-medium project) those I've heard of, or used:
- CDash
- CruisonControl
- Hudson
- Jenkins - Hudson fork that has largely replaced Hudson.
- TeamCity
Environment: C++, C#, Python, PHP... can be various.
PS: Preferably give one answer per tool or comment on it there is already one.
Answer
I can't comment on CDash or TeamCity, but I think CruiseControl and Hudson both have their advantages:
- CruiseControl is very well suited to projects that build with Ant or Maven, and has a much clearer UI if you have a large number of projects. It also does a number of (IMO) obvious things by default, like including a change list in build emails and notifying via email on successful builds as well as failed ones, that Hudson doesn't do without installing and configuring extra plugins.
- I've found Hudson easier to set up for builds that use a shell script or makefile rather than Ant; it's really a generalized job control application rather than a build system. If you need to build on multiple platforms, Hudson's slave node setup is very straightforward. Hudson is definitely easier to extend, via the plugin mechanism.