H2Eclipse User Guide

Introduction

H2Eclipse intends to offer the most important (as in most frequently used) Hudson features right in Eclipse. Where features from the Hudson web UI are not (yet) available the plugin offers to open the relevant web UI page in the Eclipses internal web browser.

H2Eclipse use Hudson's remote access API to interact with the CI server. Hence, the limitations of the Hudson API naturally are the limitations of what H2Eclipse could ever offer.

Preferences

Before you can start working with the H2Eclipse plugin you need to configure the Hudson instance(s) you want to monitor. As with other Eclipse plugins the configurations can be found at Window > Preferences in the Hudson tree node.

General

If you enable auto refresh the Hudson server is queried every n seconds an the information the Hudson view (see below) is updated. The auto refresh countdown is reset every time you manually issue a refresh request.

Hudson instances

You can either add Hudson server configurations manually or you can have H2Eclipse attempt to auto discover Hudson instances in your network (Hudson listens on UDP port 33848).

H2Eclipse supports both "root" URLs to a Hudson instance as well as URLs to views such as <hudson>/view/<view_name>

Status overview

In order to display the above view you need to click Window > Show View > Other...', type 'Hud' in the text filter and select the 'Hudson' view.

This is the only view H2Eclipse currently provides. It acts as your Hudson cockpit. You can:

• manually refresh the view by clicking the standard refresh icon in the view's top right corner
• get an overview of the status of Hudson job
  • it's a single table entry for freestyle projects
  • there are nested entries for multi-module projects
• if you right-click a Hudson job you can
  • either trigger a build or
  • open the selected job in the browser

Note: H2Eclipse can currently only determine whether a job is buildable in general (as reported by Hudson) and not whether you actually have the permission to trigger a build. The 'Build' action is not displayed when the job is not buildable. If you don't have permission to trigger a build H2Eclipse will display an error dialog when you click the 'Build' action.

Green Balls: H2Eclipse supports the Green Balls plugin on Hudson. When you add a new Hudson instance H2Eclipse auto-detects whether the instance has the Green Balls plugin installed or not. If so, build success is reported with green icons as in the Hudson web UI.

Hudson views

H2Eclipse detects what views the configured Hudson has and displays a tab at the bottom of the table. Whenever the table is populated all views are also populated. So, when you switch from tab to the next the table is updated instantly.

Viewer settings

The viewer settings allow you to select one of your configured Hudson instances. Also, you may enable/disable the text filter at the top of the jobs table.

Notifications

You don't constantly have the H2Eclipse view in the foreground to find out when things go haywire on your CI server. After each refresh the previous state is compared with the current state. Failed jobs are detected and you'll get notified through an Eclipse pop-up in the lower right corner of your screen. It automatically fades out after a few seconds.