Instant Messaging Plugin

Plugin Information

This plugin provides generic support for build notifications and a 'bot' via instant messaging protocols.
This plugin itself is of no use for end users. Please use one of the derived plugins like the Jabber or the IRC plugin!

Features

Build Notifications

You can configure per job to get notifications for finished or started builds (optional). Notifications can be send to chatrooms or individual users (aka. private messages in IRC).

You can choose from a number of strategies for which build outcomes notification will be send:

• all
• failure - notifications for failed and unstable builds
• failure and fixed - notifications for failed, unstable builds and the first fixed build after that
• change - sends notification every time the build outcome changes (e.g. from stable to unstable)

Notify culprits and fixers

If your job is build from a SCM,  you can choose to notify:

• users who broke the build i.e. commiters to the first failed or unstable build
• culprits from a previous build i.e. commiters to a previous failed/unstable build and the current build is still failing/unstable
• fixers i.e. commiters to the first stable build after a failed/unstable build
• upstream committers: see below

Notifying upstream committers

For this feature to work you need to fingerprint your build artifacts. For Maven jobs this should work out-of-the-box. For other job types see the Blame Upstream Committers plugin for how to configure it (haven't tried it myself yet, though)

The following happens if this option is enabled:

If a build fails and there are no committers to the job itself the IM plugin looks for committers to upstream builds. If there are any, all of them are notified. If there are no committers to the immediate upstream builds, the plugin looks one level higher and notifies possible committers there. And so on, if needed.

Manage jobs via a 'bot'

You can control various features of jobs via a bot. To do so you can send commands to it within a chatroom (or as private messages).

To execute a command send the command and its parameters send it to the bot in chatroom (or as a private message) and prefix it with the command prefix which is configured in the global configuration.

For example to schedule a build for the My project job if the prefix is ! send:

!build 'My project'

Most commands can be invoked on a single job, all jobs in a view or all configured jobs. Notable commands are:

• status: displays the status of the build i.e. last build result and last succesful build
• health: displays the build health as computed from the last build results, test results, (compiler warnings, findbugs warnings, ...)
• build: schedules a new build for a single job
• abort: abort a currently running build
• help: get a list of all available commands

Issues/Gotchas

• the plugin will serialize all builds for a job which is configured with the Execute concurrent builds option. Means: build n can never finish before build n+1. If needed build n+1 will wait until n finishes even if n+1 would have finished long before n. This is required, because the plugin needs to compute the exact build result (e.g. for FIXED, STILL FAILING, STILL UNSTABLE)

Changelog

Version 1.4

• new option to inform upstream committers (HUDSON-4629 )