OSDev.org

Hi, I've recently got a VPS with root access, and I have more than enough space and bandwidth(and CPU power), so I was thinking of this idea...

What about a nightly build hosting service? like basically you have a limited shell account with a script that runs as a cronjob and you provide a script to get the latest version of your code and to build it, and then copy it to a special directory where it is then made web-accessible.

I've been wanting to do this idea for a while, but only just recently got hosting that gives me root access. Would anyone be interested in this idea? (I was also thinking it could be free for opensource stuff, and a small fee for closed source)

In my opinion, nightly builds have no place in an operating system project. They're mostly static projects which generally have little change (daily) to repositories. On the other hand, weekly or fortnightly builds are, in my opinion, a good idea. That way you cover what could be one or two lines changed and pushed, or several thousand new lines.

I like the idea (our project already has such a system being implemented), but I think nightly builds may be a bit too frequent.

pcmattman wrote:In my opinion, nightly builds have no place in an operating system project. They're mostly static projects which generally have little change (daily) to repositories. On the other hand, weekly or fortnightly builds are, in my opinion, a good idea. That way you cover what could be one or two lines changed and pushed, or several thousand new lines.

I like the idea (our project already has such a system being implemented), but I think nightly builds may be a bit too frequent.

well of course, it could be an option as to how frequently to build. But I'm not only intending this for OS projects. Though OS projects have special catering sometimes, such as creating a loopback device to generate a floppy image with a filesystem. I could also have it so you can submit a root ran script(which I tediously check and approve) for such a thing(which once submitted can not be edited without approval).

But yes, for OS projects you are correct, nightly is too frequent, but that should be left as an option(or maybe a global bi-nightly build if I have too many projects to build so that I could divide half into one night and half into the other)

Well if you can specify the time granularity of builds, then it'd be a good idea.

I think, however, your biggest challenge won't be technical, but rather will be getting "customers"

pcmattman wrote:Well if you can specify the time granularity of builds, then it'd be a good idea.

I think, however, your biggest challenge won't be technical, but rather will be getting "customers"

true.. it doesn't really matter if anyone wants it though, cause they won't be paying anything anyway. I just know how much of an inconvenience it is to setup nightly builds that are web accessible(as in building on a cron local then uploading to the server, or even worse for windows) so I figured I could just put it out there and maybe a few people would use it.... and... if a lot of people use it, then I put up a few ads so I can pay for extra bandwidth and computing power

this does of course, need quite a bit of planning to launch for security issues and such but it shouldn't be too hard..

then, if no one likes it, oh well I have myself a place to make nightly builds for my projects lol

My nightly build scheme involves a call to make, so I don't waste CPU when I'm not doing my chores

Yet I still managed to bork it and couldn't care to fix it yet

Combuster wrote:My nightly build scheme involves a call to make, so I don't waste CPU when I'm not doing my chores

Yet I still managed to bork it and couldn't care to fix it yet

I am not quite sure what you mean a call to make. Do you mean from cron directly calling make? or what?

Does it matter?

I call a shell script, which updates the local copy, rebuild if necessary, flush web caches, and rebuilds the documentation. I could do some ugly Makefile trickery and have cron call make directly, but that would not really improve maintainability.

I wrote a little build bot in PHP for my OS, which runs every night (but only builds if the repository has changed). I used PHP because you can call it from a cron job it's dead simple to whack the results in a MySQL database which another PHP script can display in the browser. It can also email results if I want it to.

It's not all that elegant, and I haven't put many features into it, but it works pretty well.

Steve the Pirate wrote:I wrote a little build bot in PHP for my OS, which runs every night (but only builds if the repository has changed). I used PHP because you can call it from a cron job it's dead simple to whack the results in a MySQL database which another PHP script can display in the browser. It can also email results if I want it to.

It's not all that elegant, and I haven't put many features into it, but it works pretty well.

I think I just accidentally your PHP script, is that bad?