Managing Installations

Continuum allows you to configure the build tools it uses to build projects by defining Build Environments. Installations allow defining environment settings and are the basic unit of a Build Environment.

For example, say you need to maintain two build environments. One using JDK 5 and Maven 2.0.9 and another using JDK 6 and Maven 2.1.0-M1. To achieve this, you would need to do the following:

  1. Create Installations for the versions of Java and Maven.
  2. Create Installations for any environment variables you want to set such as MAVEN_OPTS and ANT_OPTS.
  3. Create the desired Build Environments, specifying the combination of Installations to use.
  4. Assign the Build Environments to your Build Definition Templates or project-specific Build Definitions.

Installations

Installations are essentially named environment variables. There are currently two types of Installations: Tools and Environment Variables.

Tools

Tools are meant to provide locations to pre-defined tool types. Currently, continuum allows you to define locations for the JDK, Maven 2, Maven 1 and Ant. When you create a tool installation, you specify a human-friendly name, the tool type, and the path to tool. Continuum verifies that the specified tool type resides in that location or fails to create the Installation.

Example: Defining a Maven2 Installation

From the menu, choose the 'Installations' entry

Installations

Here you must choose the Installation Type you want to add (here a Tool)

Installation Type Choice

You must configure the tool you want to add

Tool Setup

The value 'Value/Path' field must specify the path to the tool:

  • For maven2 : it must be similar to your M2_HOME
  • For maven1 : it must be similar to your MAVEN_HOME
  • For ant : it must be similar to your ANT_HOME

Continuum validates the path specified depending on the type of Tool:

  • For maven2 : <path>/bin/mvn -v will be tested
  • For maven1 : <path>/bin/maven -v will be tested
  • For ant : <path>/bin/ant -v will be tested

If the path you specify fails the test, the following error will be displayed:

Installation validation failed

You can use the checkbox if you want to create a Build Environment with the same name as your Tool name.

Environment Variables

Environment Variables are simply a means to store environment settings using a human-friendly name. Once defined, they can be used to affect the build tools used to build your projects. They consist of a human-friendly name, the name of the environment variable to set and the value. Unlike Tools, Environment Variables are not constrained by continuum. No validation is performed to validate the values.

Example: Defining a Java Heap size Environment Variable for Maven2 Tools

From the menu, choose the 'Installations' entry

Installations

Select the Environment Variable Installation type

Select env var as tool type

And finally, specify the human-friendly name, the environment variable name and the corresponding value. Here we define MAVEN_OPTS that will set the Java heap size to 256 Megabytes.

Define the env var name and value