Triggering Hudson builds with Mercurial hooks - a variation

Ashlux writes about triggering Hudson builds with Mercurial hooks on his blog. The basic hook described is:

[hooks]
changegroup.hudson = curl http://hudson_url/job/project_name/build?delay=0sec

I use this technique as well a lot with two refinements:

1. I use polling instead of build. So the url is http://hudson_url/job/project_name/polling. This will poll your Mercurial repository and only if something really changed, the build will be triggered.
2. Instead of setting up authentication I always use the TOKEN approach described on Remote access API, so the url gets http://hudson_url/job/project_name/polling?token=TOKEN

Using tokens you do not need to submit any authentication information. Bitbucket offers a POST service which you may use instead of the aforementioned hook. Github offers a similar service.

Fun with Javascript for Hudson

Right now, I do not have a lot of experience with Javascript but after having seen some funny stuff done to our internal Bugzilla with a userscript (templates for bugreports patched into the comment field), I decided to give it a try. Sometimes jobs in our internal internal build servers (Hudson) will break over night because of full hard drives e.g. So we created a special view with all failed builds and a Hudson extension to build all jobs in a view.

Now I thought this could be easily accomplished with Javascript as well, so I read a little bit about YUI2, which is included in Hudson already and came out with my first Javascript extension, which I host on Bitbucket.
The source code:

• I just save the script in the userContent folder of Hudson and source it in the description of the view like this:
  <script src="/hudson/userContent/hudson_extensions/he-all.js" type="text/javascript"></script>.
• First, I attach the initialization with the help of the YAHOO.util.Event.onDOMReady to the point in time when the whole page is rendered, on my first tries I only collected the links already rendered up to the point where the script was included.
• If any job build links are found (isBuildHref), I render a Build All link.
• When hitting the link, I just iterate over the links (buildAll) and send an asyncRequest discarding the result by not specifying a callback function at all to trigger the actual builds.

Now I already can think of other useful stuff to do with this :-).