A few weeks ago I’ve hacked together some scripts to use the openSUSE build service as platform for nightly builds. The build is kicked off every hour when something new can be build.
Additionally I’ve created a small PHP client which queries the openSUSE RESTful API and shows packages, binaries, the build log of the last build and a build history.
The code for this is GPL’d and can be cloned via monotone:
$ mtn clone thomaskeller.biz biz.thomaskeller.monotone-nightly
All this could be polished and secured quite a bit more and its even arguable if its a good idea to “misuse” the openSUSE’s infrastructure
for nightly builds like this, but I see it more as a proof of concept. Since their build infrastructure code is open source as well, somebody
can always just setup a build server together with a service and a couple of predefined XEN images and should be good to go.
The concept can now be horizontally applied to other distros and versions as well, basically anything what can run within a Xen instance
(unfortunately this does not include Mac OS X or Windows, so there is still the need for some kind of alternative build infrastructure). I
eventually plan to add a couple of more Xen instances to my project and try to get them build – of course you can be my guest and play with it yourself and lend me a helping hand here 🙂