Setting up an Android Build Server – Part 1: The Server

Update – Oct. 2015: This is out of date. You can set up a FREE CI server through CircleCI. Watch this video on how to do that.

This post is the beginning of a series of posts that will outline how to create an Android build server using the Hudson Continuous Integration (AKA: Hudson CI) software.

This post is part 1 in the series:

Posts:

* Part 1 – The Server (This post)
* Part 2 – Installing Hudson
* Part 3 – Installing the Android SDK
* Part 4 – Communicating with GitHub (coming this week)
* Part 5 – Creating a Hudson Build Job (coming this week)

In this post I’m going to outline the server and what I did in order to get the components installed in order to install Hudson CI.

The Server

I’m using a 64 bit Ubuntu 10.04 LTS headless server (no gui) that is hosted on ChunkHost.com with 256mb of Ram. The reason why I’m using a Linux box is simply because I was part of the ChunkHost.com beta testing program and I had a free box for almost a half year to test on. You can run Hudson CI on Windows as well if you prefer. However, this series is based around 64bit Ubuntu 10.04.

Hudson CI Requirements

Hudson is a Java program, therefore we need Java installed (if we’re building Android, then we also need Java for that, so its a double requirement). If you’ve played with Ubuntu 10.04 before, you may have noticed that Java is NOT part of the default 10.04 install. I’m not exactly sure of the reasons, but regardless, it sucks. Therefore you have to install it.

If you look on the web you’ll find tons of posts stating

Just run ‘add-apt-repository “deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner”, and you’ll be golden, brother! Just run “apt update” and you’ll be good to go!

Yeah. Sure. Right. It wasn’t “that” easy. If you run that command you’ll probably get an error that looks something like this:

add-apt-repository command not found

I received this error (above, this is not the exact error, but it looked something like that) and had to figure out how to get this command to work, so I could add the apt repository. Could I have edited the sources list manually? Yes. But I wanted to know how it worked. So I figured it out.

Adding add-apt-repository

To get the command, add-apt-repository, you have to add python-software-libraries to your system. To do that, run the following code:

apt-get install python-software-properties

Once that has been run, you’ll then be able to add java by adding the new repository.

Adding Java to Ubuntu 10.04

Now that we have the python software libraries I can add the new repository for apt to find java.

Add the the repository by doing this from the command line:

add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner"

This will add a new repository to the list of sources that APT will look in when its updating the system software.

You will now need to update the apt cache. Do that by running the following command:

apt-get update

You’re FINALLY ready to get Java installed on this server.

To install Sun’s Java, run the following command:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre sun-java6-jdk

The command above installs Suns JRE, JDK and binaries.

You should see a Java EULA screen. Once it shows up, tab to <OK> and hit enter. Then arrow to the <Yes> and hit enter.

Sun Java should now install on your machine.

Wrap Up

In this post I took a Ubuntu 10.04 LTS headless server and got Java up and running on the machine. In the next post I’ll show you how to set up Hudson CI.