Several weeks ago, I blogged about how I've completely automated our builds using CruiseControl (along with Subversion and JIRA). That was a ton of fun and has been a real boon to productivity. But I'm taking another look at it now.
Today, I happened across Luntbuild. I almost passed it off as just another automated build tool, but after reading a bit of their documentation, I decided to give it a harder look. And I'm glad I did.
Luntbuild, like CruiseControl, is a tool for scheduling your builds. But Luntbuild is so much more awesome than CruiseControl. For instance, CruiseControl comes with a nice web-based tool for monitoring your builds, but if you want to change your builds, scheduling or add a new project then you must go to the build machine and edit some XML. Luntbuild, on the other hand, is completely configured and managed through a web-based tool. You can add projects, schedule builds, kick off manual builds, etc...all from your browser.
Luntbuild supports virtually every version control system I've ever heard of (although PVCS is curiously missing). And your builds can be Ant-based, Maven-based, or simple command-line scripts. You can schedule a build to run every so many minutes, only run when manually kicked off, or scheduled in a cron-like fashion. And (probably the coolest feature) builds can depend on other builds, which is super-handy in larger projects made up of smaller sub-projects.
The web-interface is fronted with security that prevents users from seeing stuff you don't want them to see. Any user can be a project admin (where they can edit a project), a project builder (where they can kick off builds), or a project viewer (read-only access to a project). Or you can keep some users from even seeing some projects.
Getting past features, Luntbuild is developed upon my favorite stack of frameworks, including Spring, Hibernate, Tapestry, and Acegi. Luntbuild's WEB-INF/lib directory looks strangely like the WEB-INF/lib directory of many of the projects I work on.
Probably the only thing I don't like about Luntbuild is its name. CruiseControl has an awesome name. Anthill has a slightly corny, but appropriate name. What the heck does "Luntbuild" mean? It certainly isn't a catchy name. But it is a cool tool for automated builds...check it out!
