CruiseControl

In software development, CruiseControl is a Java-based framework for a continuous build process. It includes, but is not limited to, plugins for email notification, Ant, and various source control tools. A web interface is provided to view the details of the current and previous builds. It allows one to perform a continuous integration of any software development process.

CruiseControl is free, open-source software, distributed under a BSD-style license. It was originally created by employees of ThoughtWorks to allow for continuous integration on a project they were working on. It was later extracted into a stand-alone application.

There is a version of CruiseControl for .NET called CruiseControl.NET (aka CCNet) and a version for Ruby called CruiseControl.rb.

The current version is 2.8.4, released in 2010.

The build loop is designed to run as a daemon process, which periodically checks the revision control system for changes to the codebase, builds if necessary, and publishes a notice regarding the status of the software build.

CruiseControl provides two ways of reporting build status. The first (classic) reporting is the reporting JSP and the second is the dashboard.

The build reporting is designed to present the results of the CruiseControl build loop. It is based on a HTML report managed by a JSP page. The left side of the page displays whether CruiseControl is currently building a project, and provides links to the details of previous builds. The right side of the page presents the results of the build—including compilation errors, test results and details about what files have changed since the last build.