“Ain’t no test like an elwoodicious test ’cause an elwoodicious test don’t pass!”

So one one of my co-workers thought it would be an awesome idea if we were continually reminded of our shortcomings regarding tests so he passed along a link to the CruiseControl.rb project. Getting up an running is a fairly simple affair, particularly if you are just running it locally, but we wanted to drop this on our QA server and have the dashboard served up via Apache.  Not too difficult, just a couple more steps.

Grabbing the code is the easy part, git clone git://github.com/thoughtworks/cruisecontrol.rb.git.

Add your project, ./cruise add Project-Name -s git -b branch-name-here -r git@github.com:username/project-name.git

Set up the configuration for your projects by editing ~/.cruise/site_config.rb.  The file is largely self-explanatory but it would be helpful to set Configuration.dashboard_url and Configuration.default_polling_interval which are nested in the middle of the file.

Set up the defaults for each project, like getting emails and polling times, in ~/.cruise/projects/project-name/cruise_config.rb.

Now the fun part, we use Apache with passenger so the tact we took was to install mongrel and configure Apache’s balancer to look for it on a specified port as well as password protect the app with basic authentication:

Edit your site file and add a virtual host…

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName cruise.mydomain.com
ServerAlias cruise.mydomain.com

Include /etc/apache2/sites-available/app.cruise

</VirtualHost>

Then create the app.cruise file with the following content…

ServerSignature Off

<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>

DocumentRoot /where/you/put/cruisecontrol.rb/public

<Directory “/where/you/put/cruisecontrol.rb/public”>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
AuthName “Secure Area”
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /where/you/put/.htpasswd
require valid-user
</Directory>

RewriteEngine On

# Redirect all non-static requests to cluster
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ balancer://mongrel_cluster%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]

# Deflate
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/xml application/xhtml+xml text/javascript text/css
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

Lastly create a proxy.conf file in /etc/apache2/conf.d/…

<Proxy balancer://mongrel_cluster>
BalancerMember http://127.0.0.1:8000
AuthType Basic
AuthName “Supa Sekrit”
AuthUserFile /where/you/put/.htpasswd
Require valid-user
</Proxy>

One all that is done you can cd into the CruiseControl.rb directory and issue, ruby ./cruise start -p 8000 –daemon, and you should be ready to watch your tests fail like me.