How to specify prerequisite jobs in Hudson

Question

I have a Hudson job that just does a check-out/update to a third-party library. Call this Job A.

Several other jobs depend on this library. Call them Jobs B and C. They use the stuff checked out by Job A, and need it to be up-to-date.

My question is, how can I require Jobs B and C to always run Job A (to update the library) before they run through their build routine?

If this is not possible, can someone recommend another way to achieve the same effect?

Answer 1

If I follow you, it sounds like you might need the Join plugin:

This plugin allows a job to be run after all the immediate downstream jobs have completed. In this way, the execution can branch out and perform many steps in parallel, and then run a final aggregation step just once after all the parallel work is finished. The plugin is useful for creating a 'diamond' shape project dependency. This means there is a single parent job that starts several downstream jobs. Once those jobs are finished, a single aggregation job runs

Answer 2

After thinking about the problem some more, I think I may have been over-complicating things.

Since the library in Job A is rarely updated, we decided it's probably acceptable to just scan SVN on an interval and update when there are changes. There's a small possibility that builds of B and C will miss library changes if they start right after the changes to A were checked in, but that should rarely be an issue.

Answer 3

You can do it the other way with "child" jobs. For example, you can configure A to trigger B and C after it has succeeded. (You will find the option on job A configuration page).

If you need more advanced conditions for triggering the child jobs, you can take a look at the Parametrized Trigger plugin.