Provisioning a Hudson CI server

As I wrote about before, CI in a Box is one of the easiest ways to get up and running with Continuous Integration– in fact, if you don’t believe me, check out the CI in a Box tutorial video. As you’ll see, CI in a Box makes setting up a Hudson CI server practically a breeze by leveraging Amazon’s EC2; what’s more, the video quickly sets up an SVN project that contains an Ant build (don’t worry, CI in a Box supports Maven as well!).

CI in a Box is an Amazon machine image or AMI — it’s an Ubuntu Server running Hudson and Java 6– the instance already has Ant 1.7.1 and Maven 2 installed. With this AMI running, all you need to do is configure a Hudson Job — point it to your project and you’re done! Using CI in a Box will cost about 8 cents an hour, but it’s even cheaper if you reserve an instance through Amazon.

If you think working with EC2 is hip, then have a look at how to set up CouchDB via EC2 or check out these copasetic articles, in which EC2 is leveraged for deploying Java web applications:

• “Easy EC2“
• “You can borrow EC2 too“

As you can see, EC2 makes working with the cloud…well…a breeze! Can you dig it, man?