Installing cruisecontrol.net on a machine which is not running as a server

Question

am trying to evaluate ccnet, I have gone through a number of tutorials/blogs which describe in detail on how to install ccnet. However most of them assume that CruiseControl.NET is being installed on the same machine on which Subversion repository is or it is a server machine.
I would like to know if ccnet can be installed on a non server machine and pre - configured subversion?

Answer 1

Sure this is not a requirement to install CCNet on a Server nor on the same machine as your repository.

CCNet can run as console application or windows service and both can run on windows, windows server and linux/mac with Mono.

Thus CCNet uses the native applications for source control operations (e.g. svn.exe or git.exe) it also supports the same remote repository features as its source control application. So your Subversion repository can be located everywhere your CCNet machine has access to.

I recommend you to read the Scenarios Section in our wiki.

Answer 2

I would never install my CC.NET on the same machine as my SVN repository. But that is me.

1. For local testing, you can run the command line version, and not the service. It's helpful, because the Console output actually let's you pick up on a few things while it is running. (Nothing you can't find with the service, but its cool to see it "in progress").

2. When you do install CC.NET, I would install it on a "clean" machine. The way I like to use CC.NET is to think of it as a "big fancy msbuild wrapper". Your CC.NET will pull code from the repository, and I like to pull the .msbuild defintion file from svn as well (meaning, you store it there), and then have cc.net use the "msbuild.exe" task. The less custom cc.net tasks you use, the better. If you put 99% of your build logic into a .msbuild file, you'll won't screw yourself if you ever leave CC.NET for TFS.

3. Yes, it has to be able to "talk to" SVN under some Identity. This identity needs read (maybe write) rights back to SVN. But it is the identity (account) that pulls the code from SVN. If your source code is projected (most likely it will be), then you may have to do some command calls using svn.exe to "accept the (p)ermanent certificate, using the IDENTITY that runs the CC.NET service.

1. You'll probably have some dependencies you'll need to install. I would NOT install Visual Studio 200x or 20xx. Download and install SDK's and other things as needed. Keep the build machine "clean". Document what you install.

Answer 3

It is a good practices to have CC.NET running in the same environment as developer(s). So having a standard Win7x64 OS for CC.NET is nice to reflect the dev environment.

CC.NET can be configured to access a remote or local Subversion repository depending on the svn configuration you setup.

So the answer is : yes !