8.9. Viewing and Promoting a Particular Build

Organizing releases is a crucial part of any development project. There are whole books on this subject, so we won’t try to cover this in any detail here. Basically, you need to be able to identify and distribute versions of your software in a predictable, controlled way. You need to know what changes went into a given version, and why. Ideally, you should be able to deploy the same artifact to different platforms (test, user acceptance, production, and so on) without modification. This helps to ensure that the product you are delivering is the same one that has passed all your unit, integration, (please look out for missing serial commas) and functional tests. You also need to be able to know what changes were made to the source code, and what issues were addressed.

Although Hudson does not claim to be a SCM tool, it does provide some nice features to help keep track of builds and releases. If you click on any build number, Hudson will display a detailed description of that build (see Figure 8-12). From here, you can download the artifact produced by this build. You can also consult the changes made for this build, including log messages and modified files.