Painless CI?

I recently started a new project and had the fun task of getting the build server up and running. Usually, I dislike the entire process -- creating a nant script, configuring cruisecontrol... so much xml... so little fun!

Since its a new project, first order of business -- rake for builds! Something we experimented with at Oxygen, but didn't add to our practice. If you have the options of putting ruby on your build server, switch to rake if you are not already using it. Its easy to read, easy to build projects and you can reuse code. Such a nice change from the copy and paste nightmare of nant.

After spending 1/2 a day working on cruisecontrol.net and trying to figure out what configuration I needed, I realized -- hey, you can use cruisecontrol.rb -- ruby is already on the build server and we're using rake.

I'd post directions on the extra steps or setup I needed to do, but the directions from the cruisecontrol.rb site left me with a working build -- imagine that?