Hudson build trigged by API

Question

I was wondering if there was a way to do this in Hudson (or with any of the various plugins). My IDEAL scenario:

I want to trigger a build based on a job through a REST-like API, and on that build, I want it to return me a job ID. After-wards, I would like to poll this ID to see its status. When it is done, I would like to see the status, and the build number.

Now, since I can't seem to get that working, here is my current solution that I have yet to implement:

When you do a REST call to do a build, its not very REST-ful. It simply returns HTML, and I would have to do a kind of parsing to get the job ID. Alternatively, I can do a REST call for all the history listing all the jobs, and the latest one would be the one I just built. Once I have that, I can poll the console output for the output of the build.

Anyone know a way I can implement my "ideal" solution?

Answer 1

Yes, you can use the Hudson Remote API for this (as @Dan mentioned). Specifically, you need to configure your job to accept Remote Triggers (Job Configuration -> Build Triggers -> Trigger builds remotely) and then you can fire off a build with a simple HTTP GET to the right url.

(You may need to jump through a couple additional hoops if your Hudson requires authentication.)

I'm able to start a Hudson job with wget:

wget --auth-no-challenge --http-user=test --http-password=test "http://localhost:8080/job/My job/build?TOKEN=test"

This returns a bunch of HTML with a build number #20 that you could parse. The build number can then be used to query whether the job is done / successful.

You can examine the Hudson Remote API right from your browser for most of the Hudson web pages that you normally access by appending /api (or /api/xml to see the actual XML output), e.g. http://your-hudson/job/My job/api/.

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Update: I see from your question that you probably know much of what I wrote. It is worth exploring the built-in Hudson API documentation a bit. I just discovered this tidbit that might help.

You can get the build number of the latest build (as plain text) from the URL: http://your-hudson/job/My job/lastBuild/buildNumber

Once you have the build number, I think the polling and job status is straightforward once you understand the API.

Answer 2

And what if you don't want the latest build number, but you want the build number of the build that was triggered by hitting the build URL ?

As far as I can tell, hitting that URL returns a 302 that redirects you to the job's mainpage, with no indication whatsoever of what the build number is of the one that you triggered.