I am looking into implementing a distributed build system at work, and I need some suggestions for existing tools.

Here's what I want to do:
1. have a turnkey build system, launch one program or push one button, and it all goes by itself
2. build on multiple remote machines, Win32, Win x64, and various flavors of Linux (RHEL, SLES, etc...)
3. run in a scriptable way, I need to be able to run one build and wait, then after run the other builds in parallel
4. start and stop virtual machines in VMWare which are the build slaves (maybe part of #3 above)
5. get status on builds

What we dont need to do is build every time something in source control changes, which seems to be popular with many automated tools. In the future this should be easy to integrate into an automated nightly build system.


So far I have found BuildBot, which might be close to what I need. BuildBot at least has the Server/Slave architecture that I am looking for. I am setting it up to see what features it will let me do.

My alternative includes creating my own simple tools that will work cross platform. I have considered writing some Client app that runs a simple XML-RPC server, which will launch builds. I'll create a Python build Server, which will run code that will launch builds on the remote machines, etc.


I dont know if there are other existing tools that will do what I want. Any suggestions? Much of our code and existing build scripts are written in Python, so anything based on Python would be ideal.

7/18/2007 3:15:43 PM

sounds like a fun project

7/18/2007 3:26:14 PM

yeah, i'm really hoping that I dont find a tool that does it all for me

7/18/2007 3:28:25 PM