Michael Kang's Blog

Last week, I have automated the build system on windows by Cruise Control .net, unity3d and a couple of ftp tasks. However, there was a couple of problems in running ccnet as a windows service mode. While it was running great in command prompt, it gives errors in service mode. It wouldn’t be an issue if there is a dedeciated build windows server and nobody will mess with the command window. But unfortunately it wasn’t my case.

Now I turned my eyes to mac machine which I use it less frequently.
I spent a few hours to find a good solution for it and came up with this combination.

Hudson CI + Subversion + Unity mac + Hudson SCP plugin + Hudson post build script.

Here are the steps:

1. Download hudson.war file from http://hudson-ci.org
2. Place the war file into the directory of your choice. In my case, I made a special directory called “/_infra/” and place it in here. All CI related files will be stored under “/_infra/hudsonci/”.
3. Though it will run great by running this command “java -jar hudson.war”, I want to run this more of a demon-style. There is another option of installing tomcat and place the war file under webapp but it is too much in my case. So the solution I used is this. Make this file “hundson.ci.plist” with the following information first. You can download it from here. Another trick I used here is that by explictly expressing the installation directy with “-DHUDSON=/_infra/hudsonci”, you can install the hudson in the designated directory instead of  “~./hudson”.
4. Place the file in ~/Library/LaunchAgents/.
5. Load this plist file as a service by running this command: “launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/hudson.ci.plist”
6. Check hudson installation in http://localhost:8080

References:

• http://www.solitarygeek.com/java/hudson-ci-server-a-step-by-step-guide-part-i/
• http://www.jrenard.info/blog/?p=444

As the number of the Unity3D web projects has increased, I was looking for a decent way of automating deployment.
I took some time to research and read some articles about it and finally get it all working.

The whole build pipeline was set up on Windows machine and SVN and TRAC has setup on Linux in a different machine.

Check these articles and I’m sure any one can do the same without too much of hassle.

• http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/ExternalVersionControlSystemSupport.html
• http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Command%20Line%20Arguments.html
• http://ilmatte.wordpress.com/2008/06/01/cruisecontrolnet-tutorial-part-1/
• http://ccnet.thoughtworks.com/

A few notes:

• Even though Unity doesn’t allow multiple instances when it’s running in editor, it does allows multiple instances when it’s running in batch mode
• SVN is really poorly handing binary data such as the art assets. Maybe using Mercurial might be helpful and yet just don’t have a resource to look into it yet.
• Combining with TDD tools like NUnit will be great and yet there was an unexpected error when handling GUIStyle with NUnit. Should look into more in a near future.