Comparison of Jenkins and Hudson: Options for sharing configuration among projects

Continuous Delivery is a practice which follows from the principles behind the agile manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html); 'Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software'. Continuous Integration is a part of the process of Continuous Delivery in which source code changes are integrated and tested frequently in an automated way. Hudson and Jenkins are two products which can be used to implement Continuous Integration. These tools provide build job management, security, integration for products providing reporting capabilities, integration with version control and numerous plugins are available to provide additional functionality.

Hudson and Jenkins share a history. Sun Microsystems was the owner of Hudson. Oracle took over Sun Microsystems. Some friction ensued between the original developers of the product and Oracle. Since Oracle applied for the trademark in 2010 but was not the most contributing party, several developers decided to rename/fork Hudson and Jenkins was born. Since then the projects have diverged.

In this blog post I will look at how job configuration can be reused among projects in Jenkins and Hudson. Since the projects have diverged, the solutions provided will differ. Jenkins provides the Inheritance Plugin (https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/inheritance-plugin) and the Template Project Plugin (https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Template+Project+Plugin). Hudson provides a core feature called Cascading Projects (http://www.eclipse.org/hudson/the-hudson-book/book-hudson.chunked/ch06.html#section-cascading-project).

Hudson Cascading Job configuration